


The Water Packed my Pockets Full of Stones

by LilibethSonar



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, And None of It is Sexual, Angst with a Happy Ending, Betrayal, Canonical Character Death, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Exile, Exposition, F/M, Flowery Descriptions, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force as a Mutation, Huddling For Warmth, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Sharing a Bed, Slow Build, Stranded Together in a Dark Cave, Survival, Thirst and Hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-08-02 01:31:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 45,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16295720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilibethSonar/pseuds/LilibethSonar
Summary: When Finn turned the car she saw Ben in the rearview mirror. Standing by the house, unmoving as if he wasn’t… alive.She didn’t cry on their way back to the bay: lichens and rocks outside her window were really picturesque, that’s all.When Rey saw the ocean again, her emotions ebbed. The sight of the Marauder calmed her completely, taking away her uncertainty.*The truth was bitter; he brought it on himself.





	1. The Island

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, hello, I write longer fics as well! :D This one, in fact, is already written and is in the process of beta-ing. I plan to post once a week, so tune in. Huge thank you goes to @fulcrum_of_pemberley - this whole thing would be a convoluted mess without your help! <3
> 
> The story is set in the soft post-apocalypse (as in, it's been half a century since the apocalypse itself) which is... strictly speaking, unnecessary. :D The majority of the actual plot takes place in pitch-black caves, but I had to go and complicate your basic "stranded together" trope, so, uh, I hope you like worldbuilding? We start the journey near its end, then go back to where everything had begun, then return to the present time in the last chapter, with dashes of randomness along the way. 
> 
> There's nothing explicitly violent or bloody, but there are mentions of physical and psychological torture. Also please be aware of dehydration and hunger; there are no graphic descriptions of the latter but there is a mention of weight loss. And, of course, I'll be putting the potentially triggering/upsetting stuff in the author's notes. 
> 
> The CW for the first chapter: confined spaces, drugs.
> 
> So... I think that covers everything I wanted to say so far. Let's go! ;)

Waves had  barely blushed with an early spring dawn, going from steely-gray to pink-hued, when the  _ Sea Marauder _ , a repurposed fishing boat, entered Ahch-To Bay. Rey left her tiny — three plywood walls and the ship’s metal hull — cabin on wobbly legs. To dream of the ocean for so long only to spend her first sea journey being violently sick. Rey’s luck! Not Rey’s body’s fault, though. At least, not entirely. Emotions caused by the journey’s end goal had just been… too much. Overwhelming, often to the point of throwing up.

Breathing easier on the bay’s calm waters, Rey made her way through a narrow corridor left between multiple wooden crates and up to the  _ Marauder’s _ only deck, just as crowded with supplies as its still-smelling-faintly-of-fish cargo hold.

Luke and Finn were already there, speaking in quiet voices, Luke’s left hand tight on the railing, Finn’s fingers nervously drumming on it.

“Morning,” Rey croaked, blinking owlishly at the shining pink waves and Ahch-To’s crescent-shaped rocky body, clad in shadows and morning mist. The nunnery’s ancient-looking walls — gray masonry against gray rocks and dark-green patches of grass — were looming over the higher part of the island. Long-abandoned cottages dotted its lower slopes that hugged the bay, a distant creak of windmills floating far over the water.

“Morning!” Finn grinned. “Feeling better?”

Rey shrugged, meeting Luke’s somber gaze. 

“Feel anything unusual from him?” he asked, forgoing greetings.

“No.” Rey shook her head. “He seems… resigned. Calm, almost. Must be as relieved that the rocking has stopped as I am,” Rey tried to joke but Luke’s frown only deepened.

“I’m sorry about that, Rey,” he said. “I wouldn’t’ve continued to expose you to him were the two of you not so… attuned to each other. You can never be too careful with him.” Luke sighed, looking as old and gray as the nunnery. “Well, the way back will be easier for you, at least.”

“Not having that raging bastard on board will be easier for all of us,” Finn muttered. “No offense, Luke.”

“None taken,” the older man smirked but there was no mirth in his blue eyes. Rey remained silent, eyes never leaving the lone dock growing nearer with the  _ Marauder’s _ unhurried approach. The ship was sitting so low in the water with all its cargo for the nunnery and supplies for  _ him _ ….

“Hey.” Finn gently poked her in the ribs and smiled. His lips were chapped from the salty ocean wind, Rey noticed, his skin even darker than before from all the time on the deck, helping the  _ Marauder’s _ crew. She, herself, was probably the color of sour milk. “Did you know,” Finn continued, “that Ahch-To is actually short for Ahe— um…”

“Aheleah Tobin,” Luke supplied, pointing in the direction of the nunnery, “its founder.”

“Right, right.” Rey’s ribs got another enthusiastic poke. “I thought it was a dialect word from before the Blackout.”

“It  _ is _ pre-Blackout, just not dialectal. Names are shorter now,  _ Finn _ ,  _ Rey _ .” Finally, Luke’s face brightened a bit. He was in his element. “Aheleah died a good fifty years before the Blackout happened. And her sanctuary had lived through it all, so, when time had come to restore maps, the island was renamed after her, too.”

“What— ah, what church did she belong to?” Rey wasn’t particularly curious, engaging in the exposition for the  _ Island _ chapter of a story that wasn’t even hers just to tune out restlessness — not hers either — that was waking up under her ribcage, echoing in her heartbeat. But there was no harm in knowing. At home, for the lack of a better word, there were only small altars — for small gods — to pray at. And then there was R’iia with no altars and no prayers lest the deity hear them. 

“Oh, Ahch-To founded her own. They call themselves  _ Caretakers of Knowledge _ .” Luke almost smiled. “I’ll need to go up there, say hello to those wise old fishes.” 

“Of knowledge, huh?” Finn nodded thoughtfully. “That’s why you hid the  _ Jedi  _ servers here?”

Rey couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Luke huffed into his beard good-naturedly. “No, Finn, I hid the servers here because data-frying EMPs from the mainland wouldn’t reach this salt sodden armpit of a place.”

They actually laughed at this, all three of them, though Rey’s thoughts remained distant. At last, the  _ Marauder _ was tied to the dock, its crew hurrying up and down the ramp with crates and plastic barrels.

“Will the nuns be okay with that?” Finn asked after a beat of silence. “Your nephew’s presence, I mean.”

“They put up with me and my servers, and none of us had such pretty eyes.” At this, Rey flinched. Luke was so obviously relieved to have it over and done with. It made sense, she supposed. Transporting your own nephew to a remote island in a metal… box, with holes for air and an opening — tightly locked — barely the size of a dog door for a food tray and a  _ bucket _ , couldn’t be easy. But  _ pretty eyes? _ Luke wouldn’t even say his name! Except…

_ The third night of their week-long sailing. _

_ “I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry.” _

_ Luke’s tired, sad voice in the dimly lit cargo hold — the ship’s only hold, really, save for the crew’s cabins and a galley up on the deck — and a sound of a fist meeting metal. Luke must’ve thought everyone was asleep. Rey wasn’t. She didn’t sleep at all that night, cradling her trembling right hand to her chest. _

_ Ben’s knuckles had only stopped aching the next morning. _

Rey failed him, too. She didn’t mean for it — the sedatives, the box, Ahch-To — to happen. She didn’t mean for anything to, if she’s honest; there was no plan, nothing beyond  _ that _ moment. Rey felt betrayed by Ben and, at the moment, violated, so she betrayed him right back. Then the authorities had him.

In the months that followed, countless people would tell Rey: “You did the right thing, sweetheart,” and she’d wince at the endearment and feel like a traitor — like shit — despite any assurances, least of all her own.

She should’ve made him run. Or run herself, just turned away and made Ben swallow dust. He wouldn’t’ve caught her.

Rey turned him in instead, realizing the very second he was injected with the meanest, kick-in-your-kidneys sedative and, yes, kicked in the kidneys, that he was going to die, to hang, to be decapitated with his own sword. And Rey, — small gods, and big ones, and R’iila, — Rey didn’t want it.

Maybe someone heard her. Ben didn’t get a death sentence, though not for the lack of trying from the Hosnian Republic. The trial was vicious; a vipers’ nest where justice ought to be. This was not how trials went in old books. Well,  _ an _ old book. Rey’d only read one with a trial in it and that was a trial by combat, and in Jakku legal procedures had never been commonplace, exactly, so it wasn’t like Rey knew what to expect…. But Ben wasn’t able to defend himself  _ at all _ . He’d been in a drug-induced coma throughout the whole ordeal, breathing through a tube. Had he not had someone who cared in the highly influential — and independent from the Republic — Army of Resistance….

Maybe this, too, was a trial by combat. The Resistance, led by its general, no less, battled for the right to make Ben their business and punish him in whatever way they — not the Republic — judged was adequate to his crimes.

The Resistance won.

Ben was to be sent into exile like some famed commander of the past. Ben  _ was _ a commander, technically. The box — just above five feet in height and of the same width, steel, bolted to the floor — was the Republic’s attempt (read: “ultimatum”) to “help in containing the prisoner.” Rey suspected that they insisted on it purely out of spite. It’s not like Ben could tear through walls or rip off handcuffs. She was just so glad he was allowed to regain consciousness before they sealed the container for the journey, that he didn’t have to wake up in there. Alone.

_ “You’re afraid of dark places?” _

_ “… not a fan.” _

By the end of the trial, Rey felt much like she’d been sucking poison from a snake’s bite — still poisoned but also stupid. It didn’t go the way she thought it would, none of it did, and now she was ashamed of her own impulsive actions. Burning with it, she’d been in hiding til the last minute, boarding the  _ Marauder _ when the ramp was already lifting — she had promised the general — and unable to even look at the box at first.

He’d been so angry Rey’s bones fumed, but by the end of the sailing she was longing to get closer to the container’s steel walls and peek inside. On the last night, she did.

The cargo hold was always dark, weak blinking light from very few, very old-looking light bulbs made weaker by jars of murky tempered glass (those were supposed to protect the light bulbs from shattering during a storm, or the hold itself from catching fire should the bulbs explode because of a voltage spike). The inside of the box was even darker.

Initially, glow sticks were given to Ben, but he kept throwing them at Finn and Luke when they opened the “dog door” to slide in the food tray or take out the waste bucket. He stopped only after Finn had threatened to return the bucket without its lid —  _ “We’ll see how you like the rocking then, you fucking prick!” _ — and had ignored the rest of the glow sticks since.

Giving up on peeking, Rey just sat there, the steel’s coolness seeping through her shirt’s holey back. She was starting to doze off, mind unravelling after a week of holding it tight even at night, when he suddenly spoke, his voice hoarse from misuse and slightly echo-y. Rey shot from the floor as if it bit her in the arse — she could’ve sworn he was sleeping! — and turned, bewildered, belatedly realizing she didn’t actually hear what he said.

“I— Sorry, what?”

“I  _ said _ ,” Ben repeated, sounding annoyed, “I didn’t know you, too, were on this blasted ship.” For a short moment a black eye appeared at one of the air holes. Then there was some shuffling followed by a muttered “really”. His emotions were… churning, that much she could tell, but catching nuances, here and now, was like dashing after a hard rubber ball that was chucked into a junkman’s store and was now ricocheting off things with bullet speed, wreaking havoc. For the first time since she stepped on the  _ Marauder’s _ deck seven days ago, Rey wasn’t able to get a clear read on Ben. It unnerved her.

Suddenly, words were stuck in her throat, everything she wanted to say dead in the water. Mum, Rey sat back down, leaning onto the box’s wall so that Ben couldn’t see her if he decided to look out again. His gaze was… scorching. Dark.

“I couldn’t feel you,” he said after a few minutes of loaded silence. “Were you imagining yourself inside of that pebble again?”

“Yeah,” Rey breathed out.

“Hiding from me?”

“Yes,” she answered honestly, “and no.”

“What else is there to hide from on this ship?” There was a humorless smirk in his voice but also…. Rey shoved the word “concern” out of her mind. She couldn’t shake an image (it didn’t come from  _ her _ head) of his palm, spread on the container’s wall right where her back was pressed against it, his thumb on her left shoulder blade, his little finger on the right one. The steel was too thick for his touch to warm it enough, yet she could almost feel—

“Rey.”

“Nothing, it’s— everything. To hide from. I’d rather not be here.”

At this, the whisper of warmth was gone from Rey’s back. He knew. 

“Yeah, me too.”

Slowly, Rey returned to her plywood cabin, curled into a ball, and made her mind small again, so small Rey’s entire being could fit in a smooth gray pebble the size of her palm. She stayed this way until dawn. At some point that night, the pebble became dark-gray with rain drops.

 

*

 

Ben wasn’t sure how much time had passed since they locked him in. Ten days? A week? He was disoriented, at first, still dizzy with thinking about himself as “Ben” again and sick with remnants of drugs leaving his system. Took him time to even realize they were on a boat.

Then, the world started to seep back in. The boat reeked of fish. His cell reeked of piss (the last bastion of his dignity had a lid but it wasn’t fucking hermetic). He reeked of sweat and puke.

There were people around. His uncle, whose presence was making Ben see red. Finn, also familiar, that one, but ultimately inconsequential, a moth-like disturbance in the telepathic field. Others — sailors, most likely.

Then, suddenly, she was there, right outside his cell, alive and — he hoped, oh, he hoped — unharmed. Rey. And he was a deer in headlights, mind numb, then spinning wildly. There were gaps in his memories when after the trial they woke him up from a coma. Luke wouldn’t tell him what happened to the girl who had been travelling with him.

And now she was.…  _ Why was she…? _ Something was off, setting him on edge, adding an angry sting to his vocal cords and putting his foot in his mouth. But, oh, his palms bloomed with the memory of her skin. For a hot second Ben allowed himself a new hope: Rey was coming with him to wherever it was they were shipping him. Almost like the two of them had wanted.

Then. Her words and his reality sank in. She’d rather not be here. So, she wasn’t _going_ _with_ him, she was _containing_ him. Luke’s right hand. Reading him, probably to make sure he wouldn’t try and fuck with telekinesis. And they, Ben and Rey—

Filling the gaps was like breaking a tender new skin over a not quite healed wound. They didn't get to travel together, did they? He was caged like an animal thanks  _ to her _ .

Rage didn’t come. Screams didn’t come.

“Yeah, me too.”  _ Hopeful fool. _

Ben plopped down on his nasty lumpy mattress. Rey’s presence soon shrank and sort of dissolved among the others. Back into the pebble, was it? Now that Ben knew she was aboard he could find her, too — a ripple in the hot air, a nothing-but-not-quite where an electric hum of a human consciousness must’ve been. Ben didn’t want to look but found her still, just down the hold, hiding in plain sight. So small.

And so lonely.

 

*

 

When most of the crates had been brought onto the dock and the cargo hold became relatively empty, they unsealed the container. A sledgehammer and ten minutes were all they needed. Rey had her eyes on the discarded pins which Finn had been throwing on the floor as he hammered them out. As long and thick as her middle finger and curved ever so slightly upon sealing, those were holding together eight hinges on the container’s outer side. Tightly. Even if Ben had tried to loosen them telekinetically he’d sweat over the task for the entirety of the journey anyway.

_ “Can’t you just lift it up?” _

_ “It’s a rockslide.” _

_ “I though lifting rocks is what this… force of yours is all about!” _

_ “I— No. Not  _ rockslides _. There’s a direct proportionality between your physical strength and— And you’re actually listening. Changed your mind?” _

The front wall staggered and Luke and one of the sailors moved it to the side, by that moment Finn having exchanged the sledgehammer for a shotgun bound to his wrist and holding it at the ready. The smell was—

“I’d rather have you conscious and not handcuffed for this last part,” Luke said, weary. “I imagine you’re as tired of the Republic’s methods as we all are.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Ben spat but kept still, his hands limp at his sides, his wide shoulders hunched. He wasn’t looking at any of them as he spoke. “Just get it over with.”

Now that he was standing beside the container, it was glaringly obvious how low it was. Intellectually, Rey’d known Ben wouldn’t be able to fully stand inside it, being over six feet tall, but seeing it with her own eyes—  

The pebble cracked, a short wave of sand-hot anger — at the Republic, at Ben, at herself — radiating off Rey. Ben hunched deeper, and Luke gave Rey a cursory glance.

Luke nodded, then, and went up to the deck and down the ramp, his back tense and stride determined. Ben was walking behind his uncle, albeit not as swiftly after a week in a box too confining for him to properly stretch his legs. Finn and Rey went last, the former holding the shotgun too level with the back of Ben’s head for Rey’s liking.

They made it onto the busy dock, its weathered boards creaking under their feet, and onto Ahch-To’s craggy shore where the rustiest pickup truck Rey’d ever seen was waiting. It was already loaded with supplies they’d brought for Ben (canned food, mostly, but also meds, clothes, and some instruments).

“As thoughtful as ever,” Luke sighed, sliding his palm over the car’s hood and casting a wistful sight towards the nunnery. He gestured for Ben to get in the back seat and sat beside him with a grunt. Rey and Finn took the front, Finn’s damn shotgun  _ still _ pointing at Ben. R’iila, if Luke thought his nephew a threat even now, they should’ve just handcuffed him!

“Does it run on… gasoline?” Rey asked, disbelieving, as she turned the ignition and heard the engine stutter and growl.

“It does!” Luke smiled at her briefly in the rearview mirror. “I used to rent it from the nuns but they happily presented this rust bucket to me as soon as they obtained a model with solar panels. They still have fuel, I think, but in my time it was mainly for backup generators, so they traded it reluctantly. Not like there are many safe roads here, anyway.”

_ Not that bad _ , Rey thought, turning the wheel, the truck’s tires rustling softly on rugged ground. At this exact moment the car jumped on a bump and Finn’s fingers twitched dangerously.

“Is it necessary?!” Rey finally snapped, frowning at the shotgun’s bobbing barrel. Ever the soldier, Finn had an excellent trigger discipline but, gods and spirits, did the gun grate on Rey’s nerves.

“Well, is it?” Luke asked Ben. The latter seemed surprised to be spoken to.

“No,” Ben said after a pause. He didn’t elaborate but Luke appeared satisfied by the answer. At this proximity, he, too, could read his nephew’s mood now that Ben wasn’t making a point of walling it off. There was no fight left in him, Rey  _ felt _ it leave Ben last night when he realized they weren’t on the same side. Not anymore. The memory of it was eating her from the inside worse than the cruelest hunger pangs.

“You heard him,” Luke poked Finn with his prosthetic right hand and Finn lowered the gun onto his lap, eyeing Ben suspiciously.

The rest of the ride was spent in silence. The engine was wheezing by the time the truck tipped over the island’s central ridge and onto its west side where Luke’s old cottage was tucked in a bed of grass and shrubbery.

“The  _ Marauder _ is on liquid fuel too, so it only makes one back and forth run every six months, and no one but its captain is usually willing to brave the tides. Keep that in mind when dealing with the supplies,” Luke was saying while Finn and Rey were unloading the truck. “Leia packed some seeds, though, and the birds out here are pretty nutritious, so you should be fine. The house’s windmills are up on the northern hill— I turned the power on, by the way— and there’s a well in case the pump chokes on something. It very well may. Oh, and the car is yours. We’ll drive back to the dock but you can return for it once the ship’s left the bay.”

Ben jerked his head in acknowledgement, not saying anything and just… standing there, sun and wind in his dirty hair.

“Not what you expected?” Luke prompted.

Ben’s answer was very quiet: “You know what I expected.”

“… I suppose I did. Goodbye, Ben,” Luke said in a softer voice than Rey’d ever heard from him. All his years were in his eyes.

Finn gave Ben a stiff nod and got in the truck, taking the wheel. Rey wanted to say something, too, but there was a lump in her throat. When Finn turned the car she saw Ben in the rearview mirror. Standing by the house, unmoving as if he wasn’t… alive.

She didn’t cry on their way back to the bay: lichens and rocks outside her window were really picturesque, that’s all.

When Rey saw the ocean again, her emotions ebbed. The sight of the  _ Marauder _ calmed her completely, taking away her uncertainty.

 

*

 

The truth was bitter; he brought it on himself.

 

*

 

The sun had almost set when the  _ Sea Marauder _ , a repurposed fishing boat, finally lifted its ramp. Finn was measuring the deck’s metal surface with his steps, anxious to leave Ahch-To behind. Ren— or Ben, or whatever his name was— scared the hell out of him, and for good reason. The fucker  _ (no offense, Luke) _ used to wave a bloody sword. As in, literally, it was bloody more often than not. Not to mention his actual supernatural abilities! Rey and Luke seemed to share them to an extent, but Finn had never seen either of them choke a man with their mind. Nor with their hands, for that matter.

Ren was an entirely different beast. And they’d just left him on that island unsupervised!    

The sailors took their sweet time… visiting… the nuns. Luke spent a few hours up in the nunnery as well—  _ nope, brain, not gonna go there _ — and Rey’d been in her cabin ever since they got back on the ship. But, at last, everybody was on board and the ramp was lifted.

There was a sound among the  _ Marauder’s _ machinery hum that made Finn come to attention. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, the deck empty, the dock retreating into thickening shadows. That sound, though. 

It was as if someone threw a pebble on wooden boards.


	2. Amulets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rey meets Finn who's already had his turning-into-rebel adventure. Except he was with Poe. And it really wasn't that fancy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thank you to fulcrum_of_pemberley! And to you, if you're reading it. ;)

_ "A war came first, of course. When doesn’t it? A blackout— the Blackout— landed somewhere near the end of it. It’s never become clear what cause it, exactly, a weapon or a technology that was supposed to disable weapons. In any case, it was an overkill of planetary proportions. Chaos… well, it did not ensue, for wars are usually pretty chaotic as they are, but intensify it did. _

_ Missiles falling way off-target, satellites turned shooting stars, destabilized NPPs, destabilized  _ everything _.  But, most importantly— or, rather, it was what  humanity has chosen to fixate on, unable to cope with its actual losses— lost servers. Masses of vital data — gone! _

_ Thing is… they didn’t really print things by that point. Non-digital copies of important stuff had been made but there weren’t nearly enough of those. There is no time like  _ on the cusp of a nuclear war _ to think of ecology. In the end, both paper and code turned to ash. _

_ People managed. There had been some careening towards the edges of post-apocalyptic clichés from pre-Blackout times — or even enthusiastic jumping right into them in certain regions— but humanity… won? At least, that’s how your humble lector prefers to put it. _

_ People salvaged and salvaged and salvaged and developed and mourned. Servers as a technology didn’t go anywhere: there really is no time like the aftermath of a nuclear war to think of ecology. One word, my friends. Trees. For those who argue that our world would be back to “normal” sooner if we allowed the industrial sector to work at its full capacity instead of turning on machine-tools for only a month each quarter, if we launched more satellites… it wouldn’t. Much, much sooner, we’d be left with domes of poisoned air surrounded by radioactive deserts. But I digress. _

_ All things considered, life was… fine. Stable. _

_ Year 23 PBE. Enter Sheev Palpatine. _

_ Once a shrewd politician, he fancied himself an emperor. Blew up the  _ Alderaan _ , one of the largest server centers of the time, to prove he’s worthy of the title. Took hostage our most valuable resource — knowledge. Had been ruling the continent for twenty years until a group of young revolutionaries ended him— Excuse me? Ah, no, there’s no evidence of Emperor Palpatine having special powers. Certainly, there had been rumors but those were products of cultivated ignorance among people, not anything of real substance. I must admit, though, tales surrounding the Empire’s era truly are… something else. _

_ So! Free of the Emperor, we freed slaves. We founded the Republic. To this day we’re working on undoing some of Sheev Palpatine’s deeds. History, however, is nothing if not repetitive. Year 66 PBE. Enter the First Order. _

_ Now, I know many of you are passionate, but don’t storm out at once because of what I’m going to say. We as a political system allowed the First Order to  _ happen _. By legitimizing private military companies to bring our young revolutionaries, our heroes — everyone’s beloved Army of Resistance — out of the shadows, we let another despotic regime hide and fester right under our nose til it was almost too late. Thankfully, we learned the  _ Alderaan’s  _ lesson well…. _

_ Together, my friends, we’ll study the Empire’s ways and its legacy and, using this knowledge, try to figure out how to even approach the bloody mess that the First Order left in its wake. Rebels had done everything they could. Your turn." _

-Introduction to Professor Lando Calrissian’s class Political Science and Commerce in the Post-Blackout Era. The sound record obtained through the courtesy of the Hosnian Republic University via cloud archives.

~*~

The tang of burning plastic snaked through the desert night and roused Rey from her hammock, beckoning her outside her wheel-less trailer. In the sky above the dunes, there was a toppled column of a starless blackness, lit orange from below. Smoke.

Rey wondered if one of the unregistered smelters in Plutt’s junkyard had finally caught fire. But no. The yard wasn’t that far; if it was burning, the whole sky would be aflame. Something in Tuanul, then. Going back inside, Rey’s disappointment wrestled with her relief. Plutt was a pig, but who else had a job to offer out here?

She couldn’t sleep for a long time, her small windmill too creaky and tarpaulin — where the trailer’s metal cladding used to be — rustling too loudly. When she did pass out, she dreamed of trembling hands.

Rey left the trailer before dawn, pushing up and down the dunes, her work backpack holding a water bottle, an empty canister, and a baseball bat, its handle bouncing behind her shoulder. She wasn’t heading to the yard just yet, going east of it, higher, where the sands thinned and gave ground to all kinds of scratchy brown plants. The road that ran among them wasn’t the shortest way to Tuanul and it was more cracks than asphalt, but the view was worth it.

To the east lay a wide thorn-covered plateau bordered by the brown-red mountains of the Outer Rim. Dipping down to the west, miles of the sand-pit that was Jakku seethed in unnatural heat. Further was the Graveyard of Ships. As the ocean abated, permanently, with the change of tides, an entire fleet of enormous war creatures was left there to die from rust and radiation.

_ A waste, really _ , Rey thought for the thousandth time, squinting to make out the ships’ dark forms in the soft morning light. They were but a handful of seeds from where she stood. With all that metal to scavenge and bring to Plutt, she wouldn’t’ve known hunger for months, maybe  _ years _ . And not just Rey, for it’d take an entire army of scavengers to pick those apart. But the shoreline had been polluted since before Rey was born and would still be polluted when she was dried and gray (or dead).

No ships for Jakku and no ocean. Rey could almost see its glint… or was it a quivering of rapidly heating air?

She kept walking til a sound of an engine and a cloud of dust moving towards her made her step away on the broken roadside, fingers brushing the rubber cladding on her bat’s handle. But it was only a bus from Tuanul, the one consisting mostly of beaten solar panels, pieces of grid fence fastened to its windows, jingling amulets, and grumpy passengers going to work to the city of Niima.

_ Running late. _

“Nah a good day to go town,” a Teedo driver grumbled, slowing down to a near stop and leaning out of the bus’s stuck half-open front door.

“Why’s that?” Rey asked, going backwards, noting a fresh gash on the driver’s left cheekbone.

“First Order.” He cursed in Teedospeak. “Someone stole from ‘em — they trash town, search. Didn’t let me drive ‘til trashed bus, too.”

“They burned something? Last night?”

“Ye, old Tekka’s shop.”

“And Tekka?” Rey’s jaw set.

“Firsts were pissed,” the driver shrugged. That was enough of an answer.

“Right,” Rey whispered. Then, louder: “Thanks for the warning. Here…” She held out a band aid she dug out of one of her numerous pockets.

The driver snatched the band aid, gray scales on his mutated fingers catching at its edges, and grunted appreciatively. As the bus shook away, Rey went forward again only to have her steps become slower and slower until she stopped, conflicted. Staying well off Tuanul was the wisest choice. But her water canister needed a refill, and if she wasn’t getting it in town…. The only other pump was Plutt’s who sold water for twice the price.

She wasn’t of interest to the First Order, was she?

They didn’t frequent Jakku but were known for coming a long way from a gang of Empire fanatics. First, a military company. Now — something else, big enough to drive traders from smaller countries, the Republic’s satellites, to  _ Jakku _ . People were crossing the border to try and do some business — here! — because their homelands’ trade routes were, apparently, jammed by the Firsts.

So. Rey was too small  for the First Order to notice. Her largest possession was the speeder she assembled a few years prior, and she left it at home to charge under the sun.

_ Tell old Tekka about being too small.  _ Rey winced. However strongly she disliked the man, no one deserved a violent death. Life in Jakku was violent enough.

She could sneak in using the  _ thing _ , something she did when it was essential to stay out of view, Plutt’s or other scavengers’. Get a refill — get out. But if there were too many of them there was a fat chance at least some would notice her and then she’d pay much more than twice the price for her cockiness. Those weren’t Jakku punks she could scare off with a bat.

_ Plutt’s pump it is. _

Angry, Rey yanked her once-white hood deeper over her head and stomped down a sandy slope, heading to the junkyard.

*

As she counted out thin polymeric credits and waited for the pump to spit out her share, Rey was remembering old Tekka. Lor San, was his name, and he was, indeed, old. Rey didn’t know much about him, no one seemed to. He sold amulets and charms, prayed for rain and built altars in the desert around Tuanul. No one could tell whom he worshipped, either. Tekka’s charms and prayers called out to neither Teedo spirits that were around long before the Blackout nor to bigger, “official” deities of the central Republic.

So, why? What could the old man possibly do to get himself killed by the Firsts?  _ Stupid creaker. _ Or were atrocities in the First Order’s true nature?  _ Murderous snakes. _

“Girl!” Plutt barked, snapping Rey out of her thunderous thoughts. He hadn’t started drinking yet, so the syllable was sharp with annoyance. “You gonna work today or what? Goods won’t sort themselves!”

Rey gritted her teeth.  _ Goods _ . Trash that the city of Niima was dumping around the local pollution zone. Picking through it in search of more or less valuable bits shouldn’t’ve repulsed her so much: it’s not like she knew better, ever. Yet Rey was sick of it all to her core. If only her parents weren’t—

“I am,” she bit back, placing the full canister in her backpack and hurrying away.

Greedy and greasy as he was, Unkar Plutt wasn’t stupid; instead of moving “goods” to his junkyard by trucks (and he owned plenty of those) he’d have scavengers skim the edges of the pollution with radiation meters, bring back safe stuff, and clean and sort their finds with their own hands. Rey wasn’t stupid, either, so she stayed clear of the more dangerous territories even if it meant not getting paid and going hungry.

She didn’t want to go hungry tonight, though, deciding to run to her trailer to leave the canister and take her sun-soaked speeder, when clouds of sand appeared among the dunes smeared with viscous pre-noon shadows. Solar engines purred in the distance.

The First Order was finished with Tuanul, it seemed.

“Heads down!” Plutt growled as he gave Rey a weighty cuff on the nape. “If any of you sand rats angers them and doesn’t eat a bullet on the spot,  _ I’ll _ make you eat white-hot iron later.”

A choir of muttered “yes, boss” followed, the scavengers and the yard workers leaving their tasks and hunching down, as half a dozen sleek speeders and a heavily armored truck rolled in. Rey stayed on her knees by her backpack, carefully looking up from under her hood but mostly seeing wheels and dusty high boots. And there were… lots of boots, jumping out from the truck in disciplined ranks.

Plutt stepped towards a pair of steel-toed ones but didn’t manage to say anything — a cutting female voice interrupted him on the inhale.

“Two men,” the woman said, “a valuable prisoner and a filthy deserter. The prisoner’s bloody, the deserter’s in a black under armor. Seen them?”

_ Under armor? _ Rey risked a glance up, and —  _ R’iia hear her! _ — they were wearing  _ literal _ armor, white and shiny as if it was fresh from a printer. And weird angular helmets with toned visors and—  _ Oh. _ Very big guns at their backs.

The woman’s armor was chromium-plated, and even though it was of the same awkward shape as the white ones, it was one of the most impressive things Rey’d ever seen. It gleamed in the sun like a— like a brand new car (which Rey never saw anywhere but in pictures).

Sweat trickled down Rey’s forehead and into her eye. Blinking, she lowered her head again. The sand was starting to burn her knees and calves through her threadbare pants. Noon was cruel and it was taking its toll on everybody. The woman lifted her hand, dismissing Plutt’s assurances.

“Search!” she commanded, and the white-clad soldiers dispersed along the yard’s perimeter.

That’s when Rey saw him. Under a stripped car, shielded from view by a torn off fridge door, lay a man, gray-faced with fear. Moving towards the yard’s center, the soldiers would reach his junk heap in less than five minutes.

The smart, safe thing to do would be to raise her hand and point. Rey thought about Lor San Tekka and did the right thing.

“One of them has dark skin and short-cropped hair, right?” she asked.

“The deserter, yes.” The woman was in front of Rey in three long strides. “Speak!”

Rey got a feeling that if she wouldn’t, her tongue and, by extension the back of her head, would taste the woman’s gun.

“I saw him on the eastern plateau this morning, running as if a mute  viper was chasing him.”

“We have our scouts on the plateau,” the woman hissed and turned to Plutt. “Your petty little garbage pickers better not try to throw us off the trail. You know what becomes of the Republic’s wannabe heroes.  _ And _ with their concealers.”

Plutt’s dropsical face became red with anger and paled at the same time. His eyes on Rey promised vengeance.

“As far as the Republic’s concerned, my establishment doesn’t exist,” he drawled, choosing his words carefully. “I’ve never… tolerated its supporters. Here, we have nothing but respect for your cause.”

“Is that so…” The woman turned back to Rey, looking down on her from her considerable height.

“The deserter was running through the plateau,” Rey repeated quietly, staring right into the chrome helmet’s visor. “Your scouts must’ve missed him.”

“My scouts must’ve missed him,” the woman agreed after a beat of silence. “Stormtroopers! Fall into ranks!” she shouted. “We’re heading to the plateau!”

Rey didn’t breathe until the truck’s doors closed behind the last stormtrooper and the higher ranked Firsts, including the woman, rode away on their fancy speeders. She was shaking, cold during daytime in Jakku.

Plutt was stomping around, yelling first for someone to get him a drink, then at Rey to get the fuck out of his sight. He didn’t have to say it twice. Chest heaving, Rey stood up and stumbled out of the junkyard, pulling the too heavy backpack behind herself by its strap. At the gates she cast a quick nervous glance under that car — there was no trace of the deserter, only settling dust.

*

Rey was halfway to the trailer, still a bit dizzy, when: “Psst, hey! Hey!” She hoped against hope she wouldn’t see who she knew she’d see. But, obviously, she ran out of luck for the day — and, Rey bet, for her remaining life — because there he was. The deserter dressed in black and drenched in sweat, moving towards her with the grace of an oversized iguana.

“Don’t follow m—”

“… water…”

“What?”

“You’ve… water...” He reached for her backpack, causing Rey to step away defensively. “Please!” He sounded desperate. Not taking her eyes off him, Rey pulled out her bottle — only one-third full by now but she wasn’t going to open the canister for him, no way — and tossed it to the deserter. He sucked the water out in mere seconds.

“Thank you! Oh, damn,  _ thank you! _ For— for what you did back there, too. They’d gun me down, for sure. Or bring me to Ren — which is worse.… I hoped to steal some water while no one was around— I’m no thief though— but then the workers came and I got stuck there—”

“Listen,” Rey cut off his babbling, “I did what I did but that’s it. There’s nothing else I can do for you, so stop following me.”

“But I— Sorry, I don’t have other options. It’s not just about me, so….” Suddenly, he seemed very serious. “Help me one more time and you’ll never see me again, I promise.”

Rey considered making a run for it, losing him among the dunes. He wouldn’t be able to find her home in his state, collapsing from a sun-stroke. Dying. So, realistically, Rey needed to get him away from the sun. Taking a wanted man home wasn’t a good idea but,  _ oh, well, _ none of it was. If the chrome woman figured out that Rey lied to her — or if she simply felt spiteful enough upon not finding shit on the plateau — she would come looking for Rey’s place anyway. Gritting her teeth, Rey motioned to the deserter to come after her. She didn’t let him carry her backpack should he decide to steal water after all.

The sky burned out to the lightest blue by the time they reached Rey’s trailer. R’iia was filling her lungs with sea winds to breathe out a storm.

“You gonna be sick?” Rey asked as the deserter sank to the floor, head in hands.

“… Maybe? I haven’t been in the sun for too long, that trash pile being all nice and shady.”

Just in case, Rey held out a cracked bowl and sat cross-legged by the opposite wall as he muttered another “thank you,” his eyelids heavy. She wondered if he was going to pass out but as her own exhaustion was starting to win over her, the deserter’s eyes flew open.

“Shit! Sorry!” he exclaimed. Then, calmer: “I didn’t even ask your name.”

Rey blinked at him. No one really called her by her name, not in Jakku, at least. It didn’t seem important. She said so, and it was the deserter’s turn to blink at her.

“Uh…. Yeah, no, I get it,” he said at last. “Wouldn’t’ve bothered with names myself till yesterday. But,” he gestured between them, “you saved my life. Twice, really. I’ve no illusions about surviving in Jakku with no roads under my feet. So, I need to know who to thank. Oh, and I’m Finn, by the way.”

Despite herself, Rey smiled.

“I’m Rey.”

There was a minute of awkward silence, neither of them knowing where to go from this point in the conversation. Or, rather, how to approach the “help me one more time” part. Then they spoke at once.

“About—”

“What happened yesterday?”

Finn opened and closed his mouth. “Okay, I should start with yesterday anyway.” He cleared his throat. “I’m— I  _ was _ a stormtrooper, a— a foot soldier of the First Order. Served them longer than I can remember — they ‘recruit’ us young, like, forget-how-your-mama-called-you young — but yesterday was my first operation directly under the Order’s big deals. My platoon was to accompany the main enforcer as he….” Finn scratched his neck, nervous. “As he investigated a lead in some top-priority business, I guess. We weren’t told much besides the operation’s basics, but, from what I managed to put together, someone ratted out the location where some of the Order’s enemies were meeting. Ren — that’s the enforcer — was to interrogate them. We were to shoot.”

For a long moment, Finn fell silent, as silent as the desert outside the trailer, melted shadows slowly, so slowly getting longer, spreading across the sand like oil stains. Their respite would be over soon; Rey could tell with frightening clarity, now, that they had to run, to hide until the storm passed. But they still had a few hours.

Finn gathered his thoughts again.

“The lead was good. We caught that old man with a Resistance fighter—”

“From the Army of Resistance?!” Rey couldn’t help but interrupt, eyes shining with momentary wonder.

“Yes,” Finn chuckled, “exactly.” He exhaled loudly through his nose. “We dragged them outside. Then Ren lost it. I mean, his rage is the stuff of legends, but…. The old man said something to him; next thing we know — Ren made a kebab of him.”

_ “What?!” _

“A kebab. Meat on a sti— Oh, you meant— Sorry. Our guns are shit, so Ren carries a big-ass sword. That’s how he… well.” Seeing Rey’s horrified expression, Finn hastened to move on. “Then something exploded inside the old man’s shop, a lightbulb or… I don’t know. Went up like a bonfire, and I… lost it, too. Our— the Order’s  _ mission _ was bullshit, and Ren’s always scared the hell out of me, and I thought about running while everybody was staring at the fire, and he noticed me thinking it,  _ I know _ he did. So I thought to myself, welp, ‘trooper 2187, you’re as good as dead now — might as well screw them over on your way down.”

He was looking at his palms now as if his story was written on his skin. Moving very quietly, Rey opened the canister and filled her largest cup with water — Finn gulped it down, only scarcely aware, by the look of it, of what he was doing.

“Ren was busy… raging. Then the townsfolk showed up to put out the fire. First chance I got in the commotion, I tased the ‘troopers on guard duty, uncuffed the Resistance guy, Poe, and we ran. Didn’t make it too far when they realized, though. Someone probably found my ditched armor… and the guards, I guess. So they cordoned the town’s outskirts off, started to scour it, street by street. We’d been stuck almost until dawn, waiting for an opening.”

“Where did you hide?” Rey asked, careful, yet curious. Tuanul had just above a couple hundred houses, not counting its slums, and nothing the First Order wouldn’t’ve cut through like a knife through butter.

“In a pit under an outhouse. It was empty but no one was in a haste to stick their head in.”

“… How did you know it’d be empty?”

“We didn’t!” Finn seemed more at ease, a sheepish smile tugging at his chapped lips. “So, when we climbed out near morning, we split up. Poe had his speeder camouflaged at the town’s edge; said that it’s real fast and he’s one hell of a driver. I didn’t see much after that, but man! His ride’s ignition  _ roared _ . Made Captain Phasma and all her people chase after him. I escaped while the rest gawked at his tail lights. Damn, I hope he’s okay….”

“Wait, wait!” Rey shook her head, cheeks reddening with ire. “He  _ left _ you? Just… drove away on his fast speeder after you saved his neck?” She hadn’t known Finn for two hours yet, but the thought of tail lights receding into the night till they were no bigger than two laser dots was— .

“It was my idea,” Finn shrugged. “There was no telling if he could actually shake Cap— shake Phasma off even without my weight on the back wheel. Besides… there’s no outrunning the First Order.” Fear crept onto his features again, gathering in drops of sweat on his temples, but he steadied himself. “Playing cat-n-mouse with them never lasts long, especially in places like this one. I know. Poe knew it, too, so he left me…” Finn reached under his shirt’s high collar, “with this.”

From his fingers dangled what Rey recognized as an amulet from Lor San Tekka’s shop. Bits of rubbish, roped together in Jakku’s true spirit: shards of plastic, feathers, wood chips, dingy beads, and among all of that — a white and orange ball of technology on a bright steel ring. A memory keeper.

“What’s on it?” Rey was enraptured: the situation had mutated into something straight out of a pre-Blackout spy novel.

“Don’t know, that’s what I need your help with. You have a reader, right? Please, please, tell me you have one! Everybody has a re—”

Rey shoved her ink-tablet under his nose. It was almost her age but any technology that wasn’t for accumulating energy changed slowly, if at all. Breathing out an “okay,” Finn placed the keeper on the ink-tablet’s display. Ink froze for a moment and jerkily rearranged itself from a list of Rey’s books to a long line of numbers and letters.

“What are those?” Rey peered at the display, tilting her head to the side to see upside down.

“I didn’t ask anything in case they caught me before I got to the transmitter. Something the old man kept safe. Poe told me the wiring around the computer this was on was wicked, which, now that I think about it, is probably why the house—” He made a “poof!” sound.

Rey hummed, inky-black symbols finding their way into her memory. Then a word Finn had just said surfaced, pulling her attention back to him.

“The transmitter? You’re not going  _ back  _ in town?”

“Hell, no! Ren’s still there with the majority of our people, a mouse won’t slip by them.”

“So… you mean the emergency one, under Jakku radio tower?”

“Bingo! If I can’t run, at least I’ll make sure Poe’s mission is complete. Don’t care much about the Resistance — it’s supposed to be the Order’s arch nemesis or whatever — but Poe, he’s a good man. If the last thing I do is help him, well….”

“But—” Rey started, then trailed off. Started again: “You’ll have to cross the plateau to get to the tower, and I sent them…”

Finn nodded, so calm about it now. It was infuriating, Rey got pissed at this Poe — and herself — all over again. Finn was  _ good _ . Better than anybody she’d met in a long, long time. He didn’t deserve to be gunned down by the very people he’d served with because of some spy nonsense.

“But what if your Poe did outrun Phasma?” Rey tried. “She was still looking for both of you today. For all we know, he could already be in Tatooine or even closer to the center if his speeder really is that fast. And—  _ And _ , this thing, he has it memorized, right? He must, or he wouldn’t’ve left the keeper to you! You don’t have to—. Come with me. I know places where we can wait for the Firsts to leave! We’ll send the transmission after they fuck off.”

There was something raw in the way Finn looked at her when her words ran out.

“You know,” he said, “I haven’t met good people in forever. To meet two in these circumstances feels like some cruel joke.” Finn sighed, hiding the memory keeper under his shirt and standing up. “The Resistance needs it yesterday. Poe… could be lying in a ditch with a broken neck. There’s just no other way but to try and send it immediately to anyone who’d listen, Rey. I’m sorry. And thank you.”

“Take the reader.”

“You sure?”

“Just take it!”

“Right… you better get going, too. Those hiding places of yours? Choose the furthest one and make sure you won’t cross paths with the Order again.”

He was gone in a few minutes, the ink-tablet tucked under his waistband, Rey’s water bottle tied to his belt by a piece of twine and Rey’s scarf covering his head and face — maybe this way the sun wouldn’t recognize him. Rey didn’t shake his hand good bye.

Necessary supplies and everything of value she owned easily fit into her backpack. She was low on food, having only a couple of flour-and-water flapjacks. If the Firsts didn’t show up in Jakku, she’d get fresh morning water from Tuanul pump and the day’s payment from Plutt, and then she’d go back into town to the evening market. She’d buy some dried fruits and nuts and maybe even cured meat. And more flapjacks and— Rey’s stomach growled. She shoved a sling in her pants’ pocket. No market for her — only a lizard hunt on the edge of the polluted zone.

She locked the trailer’s wonky door even though there wasn’t much point to it: no matter how many sticky fingers she’d broken with her bat over the years protecting her stuff, in Jakku, if you left your home for longer than a day  _ someone _ was bound to trash it.  _ She couldn’t fucking wait to come back to every screw being stolen. _ Damn the Firsts. Damn Finn.

After fastening the canister to her speeder’s side with thick rubber bands, Rey hopped on its hot seat, reaching for the ignition. And stopped, heart pounding, drops of sweat sliding down her belly. Her shirt was clinging to her shoulders under the backpack straps. The air was clammy, heavy with heat; the desert kept eerily quiet as R’iia held her breath before drowning her land in rain and sand and salt. A thin gray line was frowning on the horizon.

Rey had an hour before the goddess’s sigh, an hour and a half if she was lucky. If she couldn’t make it before the storm hit, she’d have to ditch the speeder lest she wanted to become deep-fried by lightning.   

She had about two hours before Finn would make it to the radio tower.

Rey screwed her eyes shut. The line of symbols chased its tail in the darkness behind her eyelids.  _ Coward. Crawl in a hole and wait when they shoot him. Could’ve just told Phasma where he was hiding and spared you all this trouble. _

_ No. _

Buttoning the lower part of her hood over her nose and mouth and sliding goggles over her wet eyes, Rey hit the ignition and turned the speeder away from the polluted zone in the west, a wave of sand rising from under the back wheel. She’d ride north-east, to Tuanul. Sneak into the post office where the town’s community transmitter was, send this bullshit radiogram. Try to catch Finn before he reached the tower on foot, slowed down by having to constantly look at the sun as to not lose direction.

And Rey’d try not to get  _ herself _ caught — or killed.

The solar engine purred as the speeder’s wheels started to eat the distance, the sound echoing in the mountains of clouds above the far ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *In this chapter I use the word “mute” as a short for “mutated”, it has no connection to disabilities.  
> **If you're thinking, wait a minute, isn't it weird that Rey remembered the thing just by looking at it? You're right, it totally is, even if Rey doesn't see it as such. Gotta stick with me to find out what's up. :D
> 
> I hope you liked it! Please, let me know what you think in the comments.


	3. Tuanul

_“…I insist that calling it ‘magic’ means to oversimplify and complicate the matter at the same time. They’re psychokinetic abilities of a wide spectrum caused by an aggressive post-war mutation — that, apparently, is what you get after nuking half the planet. And we should deal with them, as was the case with all human mutations we’ve encountered so far, as scientists. Not inquisitors.”_

\- From a private correspondence. Year 76 PBE.

 

~*~

 

The violence of his reaction shocked even him. Lor San Tekka — a friend of a family long lost; how had he become so old? — spoke, and Leader Snoke’s incantation that’d been beating in Ren’s head like a war drum, rhythmic, steadying, pushing him forward— it screeched, clashing against Ren’s faulty mind. When his vision cleared and the pain abated, Lor San’s eyes were already becoming glassy with death, Ren’s sword slicing the old man’s body from stomach to shoulder in an upward strike Ren didn’t remember making. Right through the heart.

He’d lost control before — however thorough Leader Snoke’s guidance had been, Ren’s rage was just too fiery to be honed into a cold weapon — but never like this, not since—

As Lor San’s body slid to the ground, Ren felt the stormtroopers’ distress. It was clogging up the telepathic field as radio interference, and a strong impulse to run was coming from one of them, but Ren was too busy staring at his blade, hypnotized by flashes of fire on durasteel and a rhythmic dripping of blood, black on the sand. The ‘trooper did run and he took Ren’s only living prisoner with him. The pressure of townsfolks’ minds rendered Ren useless during the search, letting the two bastards slip away from under his nose along with whatever information Lor San Tekka had managed to pass on.

Ren’s operations had gone south before but this one was a fucking disaster.

Hours trickled by. The incantation faltered, and he wasn’t able to get back into a state of meditative focus. He never had been, not on his own; it required a prolonged meditation under Leader Snoke’s watchful eye. And without it Ren was a… mess, his powers making everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor rattle and shake, and his emotions all over the place. _Leader Snoke won’t be pleased._

“Time is of the essence,” he had told Ren upon sending him to Jakku.

They would’ve lost the element of surprise if the attack on the Hosnian Republic was postponed any further, but Leader Snoke wouldn’t launch the missiles before the _Jedi Library_ was acquired. Aiming to restore the Empire, Leader Snoke, however, wasn’t Palpatine. They were to bring _order_ to the continent, not set their long suffering civilization on fire. Hosnian banking systems, major labs, and government districts would burn, yes, but all vital data would be safe on the backup servers — the _Jedi_ servers — under the First Order’s control. Protected.

That was, when Ren found them. For they were missing, stolen years ago by those fond of the Republic’s corruption, by those _desperate_ for the world to stay the way it was. Coming online regularly, every new blueprint, formula, and birth certificate being loaded onto them, the servers themselves stayed untraceable, their location hidden by the Republic’s willful ignorance.

Granted, _someone_ in the Republican hulking beast of a government knew the exact location, but Ren’s search for them had been leading him from one dead end to another. His unc— Luke Skywalker and his accomplices — it was a group’s doing, of course; Skywalker was a foreseer, not a coder nor a secret agent — were good at covering their tracks both digitally and physically. Thick as thieves that they were, they had been eluding Ren’s spies on the Republic’s side for almost a decade. Until they reached out to the Resistance, right when the Order became strong enough to attack. So, time was of the essence.

Ren had killed one prisoner without interrogating him and lost another.

_Fuck._

He had enough ‘troopers with him to lock the roads (they came ready for a fight, they always did), and leaving Jakku without following one was near impossible: whatever the pre-Blackout war did to this land, now it was messing navigational systems up, making the sun and stars the only waymarks — and even the locals didn’t trust those too much. If they wanted to get out from the desert, the traitor and the prisoner _would_ be back on a road, and Ren would regain control over the situation, but… there was something….

Ren had the only local radio tower under surveillance so that Lor San Tekka’s knowledge didn’t get out from the desert either. He smashed a portable transmitter in the post office in case the runaways would become desperate and try to crank up the “going where they don’t expect us to be” trick and sneak back in town. His people didn’t find any other transmitters, and after the last night’s fiasco Ren made sure they were thorough. The satellite phone in his speeder’s saddle bag remained the only communication device capable of reaching the outside world… and that one would transfer any call to the First Order’s secure line.

Yet he was missing something, Ren could feel it in his every vertebrae. It was pulling his thoughts perilously close to the — _wasteful_ — deaths, necessary — _not_ — to shape the world anew.

This _something_ was going to bite him in the ass, wasn’t it?

 

*

 

Rey approached Tuanul from the slums’ side, leaving her speeder and backpack in the desert so that nobody in town heard the engine and her movements weren’t constrained. Cautiously, she made her way through narrow passages between near-cardboard shacks, their walls already trembling in anticipation of the storm. The sky was still clear above clusters of wires sagging between roofs like locks of thick black hair, but there was no time to lose. Pausing in the shadow of a sturdier wall at the street’s end, Rey closed her eyes and slowed her breathing.

When she was little — the ever hungry, half-wild child running errands for Unkar Plutt — there was a pebble among her scanty possessions. She couldn’t tell where it really came from, but little Rey was dead set on the idea that the pebble was from her true home — her island. She’d clutch it in her fingers, raw from digging through trash and scrubbing it clean, and imagine herself home. As she grew older and other scavengers’ stares grew longer, the fantasy changed. Now Rey’d hide the stone in her calloused palm and will herself to become as insignificant as a pebble.

_Small, gray-skinned, nothing of interest here, nothing, nothing._

And they’d look away.

The pebble got lost at some point, but its image remained, becoming easier to call forth each time. Rey could sleep like that, even, and “hiding inside her pebble” had kept her safe more than once, so she didn’t question the nature of it, grateful.

As she stood by the wall where Tuanul’s better area started, she felt the familiar weight in her hand. Opening her eyes, Rey casually made her way along the sidewalk, heading to the town’s square. Tuanul was deserted, only a few shop owners still frantically boarding windows and unscrewing windmills’ blades. White-armored Stormtroopers patrolled the streets in pairs but there weren’t too many of them either. Nobody turned their head as Rey walked by, her bat concealed under her baggy jacket. She looked as dull as a stone under one’s boot.

Near Tuanul’s center, synthetic plywood and lime gave way to yellowish bricks. Here, the town was all clapping of tarpaulin above empty market stalls, faint hum of the central electricity substation, wires’ jerking shadows on the “no asphalt — no problem” road. Smell of smoke from the previous night: soot in the dust. Pointedly turning away from the burned out shell of old Tekka’s shop so that anger didn’t distort her concentration, Rey approached the square — and hurriedly ducked into the nearest alleyway.

A ‘trooper was guarding the post’s front entrance. It didn’t seem like Rey had been spotted yet but she surely would be, just marching to the door. She peeked around the corner at the back of the building — another ‘trooper was propping up the wall by the back entrance. _Shit._

Either the Firsts expected Finn and Poe to try their luck with the Tuanul transmitter… or they guarded it in case someone would be brave — _naïve_ — enough to attempt alerting the authorities in the city of Niima about the manhunt the First Order had started here. As if Niima would care!

But Rey cared, and knew these streets, and walls, and every loose brick. The post office was in a boring, one-story building of the same sandy-yellow brickwork as all of Tuanul’s center. Barred windows. A low plywood attic, build atop the brick main floor after R’iia had torn off the old one. A tin roof. An altar niche in a side wall.

Carefully backing away from the corner and _very_ carefully sidestepping a sleek black speeder parked in the alley by some of the Firsts, Rey caressed the niche’s edge with her fingers.

“I have nothing but my gratitude for you, sorry,” she told a spirit of shade, living in a round nest of an altar, made of discarded wires and adorned with night-bloomers, dry and dead now. The spirit didn’t answer. Maybe it had fled altogether, for today the alley was as baked as the rest of Tuanul.

Wincing as the ground burned her bare feet, Rey stuffed her socks in her boots, hid everything behind the spirit’s nest, and climbed the wall, pressing against the niche’s sides with her feet and elbows.

When her limbs were still too short, she’d press her back to one side and her feet to other. Like that, she’d clamber up to the attic. Rey had been persistent, as a child. Pretty annoying, too, coming to the post office almost daily and asking if there was anything for her. She waited for word from her parents; wasn’t very good at waiting, then. Eventually the Teedo sending and receiving radiograms became so sick of her he just wouldn’t let Rey in anymore. So she threw rocks until she found a loose sheet of plywood in the post’s newly built attic. It was right above the altar niche.

She’d worm between polymeric boxes filling the attic up to the roof and peek down through a ceiling panel’s broken corner. Rey’s sight was sharp enough to see the words on the clay tablet the radio-operator used to write everything down. She never saw her name there.

…Rey tugged the plywood’s lower edge away from the wall and hauled her body up into the narrow opening, careful not to scratch her skin with rusty nails hammered in too high, missing the attic’s frame. The roof was lower than Rey remembered, and somehow there were even more boxes. It occurred to her, briefly, that, since not so many people in Jakku were actually getting _any_ mail, the boxes were probably filled with contraband and not lost parcels as the little Rey assumed. _Huh._

Seconds were ticking away, but before Rey could rearrange her too long limbs and find the broken corner to check if the transmission room was clear, a shrill beeping sound came from the alley. Rey froze, perched awkwardly on a ceiling beam on her hands and knees, nose full of disturbed dust.

Down there, a few quick steps. A muttered curse. Then the beeping stopped and the muttering voice became louder, deep and so cold, the sweat on Rey’s arms and neck cooled.

“Ren.”

Rey pressed one palm to her mouth, eyes widening in panic. The— The— With a sword! She thought he’d be somewhere like the mayor’s house, but he must’ve been right here, in the building, and she was about to jump down on his head! Struggling to control her breathing, Rey tightened the stone shell around her reeling mind. Meanwhile what turned out to be a phone conversation was continuing and it didn’t exactly sound friendly.

“I’m working on it. There were… complications.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t do it without ensuring we have the upper hand, General. Otherwise it’s just a matter of who grabs them first! This is nonsense, I still can—” A pause.

“Understood.” A clash of plastic against brick.

In the silence that followed, Rey wished she could turn around and see if he had left, but she didn’t trust the old beam not to sigh under her shifting weight. The alley was quiet — eerily so.

Was he there? Did he notice her, somehow?

The sword.

The _sword_.

Not moving a muscle and barely breathing, Rey waited. And waited. Nothing was happening — up until the moment _something_ yanked her whole body down into the alley.

 

*

 

“I’m working on it. There were… complications.” To put it mildly.

“Complications?” Hux asked, obviously expecting Ren to elaborate.

“Yes.” Hell, _no_ , if Ren mentioned the traitor — a bug in Hux’s precious “conditioning system” for Stormtroopers — the answering rant would take forever — and the last ounces of Ren’s patience.

“Well, no matter,” Hux continued, unexpectedly smooth. “Leader Snoke wants you back at the base at once. We’re firing in twenty four hours.” He might’ve hit Ren in the gut.

“What do you mean.”

“I mean _exactly_ what I said.” _The smug bastard._

“We can’t do it without ensuring we have the upper hand, General.” Ren’s voice was straining with the effort of keeping his rage out of it. “Otherwise it’s just the matter of who grabs them first! This is nonsense, I can still—”

“It’s not up for discussion, Ren,” Hux snapped. “The Resistance agents have already come dangerously close to our launchers, we can’t waste more time. You’re free to continue running after your beloved servers afterwards.... They went online this morning, by the way. My people are looking into it and, who knows, they might actually be able to track the data stream. _I_ could be the one to grab your _Library_ and present it to Leader Snoke. Wouldn’t you like that, Ren?” Hux chucked but, not getting any answer, switched back to the tone of mild annoyance. “Forget the servers, you’re to be at the base at the time of the attack. The Leader’s order.”

“Understood,” Ren answered through the clenched teeth and finished the call by sending the phone flying into the nearest wall. He barely heard the plastic breaking through the cacophony in his own head.

Twenty-four hours were too damn soon.

He reached out to retrieve the phone. It had landed in a nest of wires in a wall niche, only its protective case being cracked, blazing red letters on the still lit display demanding the fingerprint verification. But as Ren was about to take it and turn away, he smelled… _sweaty socks?_ Someone stashed a pair of beaten up boots behind the nest, and it seemed so random that for a moment Ren was at a loss, staring at his find. Then he snapped out of it, suppressing the urge to smack his own forehead, and swept the area with a telepathic net. He almost missed them, thin trickles of fear coming from above. An image of sweat drops sliding down a sinewy arm shot through his head; concentrating on it, Ren lifted his hands and _pulled_.

A sheet of synthetic plywood and an old-looking wooden bat clattered down from the roof — and following it, a girl, tumbling from her hiding place like a sack of potatoes. As Ren slowed her fall — _a little early for injuries_ — and lowered her to the ground, not loosening the telekinetic hold in her body, he caught another image.

A kebab.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! :D   
> Let me know what you think in the comments or come say hi to me on tumblr, my side blog for fandom stuff is lilibeth-with-starwars-flavour.


	4. The Black Tide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to fulcrum_of_pemberley who pointed out bits about Ren's sword with some very *caugh* Freudian *caugh* questionable semantics. They were hilarious but, sadly, unintentional. If I ever write crack I'll use our google docs history for reference. 
> 
> CW: vomiting

_ “I prided myself on learning from the past for so long that I became afraid of the future — everyone I loved had to pay for it, in the end. _

_ My father, known to the world as Vader, the Emperor’s right hand, could foresee what was to come in damning clarity. Once, he had a vision; in it, the woman he loved more than life died tragically. He tried to save her by any means possible; he became Vader to be able to do it. She died because she was unable to live with the choices he’d made. _

_ The heartbreaking inevitability of my mother’s death convinced me that there’s no denying fate. So, when a vision of my own had shown my nephew wielding a bloodied weapon under the banner of a despotic regime… I didn’t fight it. Ben was but a boy, yet every time I looked at him I saw the shadow of his future. Here, in the solitude, I finally feel brave enough to admit: it was my mistrust that pushed him over the edge. I was tasked with teaching him, helping him. Instead, I rejected him — and created the very monster I had foreseen.” _

\- From a personal journal found in the analog library of the Ahch-To nunnery, dated year 68 PBE.

~*~

Rey couldn’t see his face as she looked up from the ground, her limbs lead-heavy and breath short. Against the sky burning with the sun, he was but a black silhouette, tall as high noon and just as dangerous. She screwed her eyes up. Everything went dark.

*

One look at the girl’s face was enough for Ren to decide to put her under. Neither telepathy nor telekinesis mixed well with blind fear and she was  _ terrified _ .  _ What a backhanded compliment _ , he thought as he zeroed in on the girl’s consciousness and snapped his fingers.

Lights on — lights out.

He’d much rather have used persuasion and ordered her to follow him inside without stunning her, but the way she’d hidden herself was a sign of, at the very least, basic telepathic abilities. If the girl was like him, persuasion alone wouldn’t’ve worked — and it was neither the time nor the place for more elaborate mind manipulation techniques. Their kind’s brains were stubborn, only yielding to drugs or deep hypnosis.

There was something more to it, a conclusion just out of Ren’s reach, beating against  _ his _ consciousness like a fly battering itself against a window pane. Annoyed, he started the incantation anew, muttering under his breath. The rhythm broke on the second verse, but thankfully he was able to tune out the buzzing.

The girl was… a girl.  _ How very eloquent, Ren _ . Young, she was young, in her early twenties, most likely, although it was hard to tell, with local folks. Face tanned and freckled, hand-me-down clothes. Pale bare feet. As Ren scooped the girl up into his arms, he also figured that her body must’ve turned everything it could into muscle; there really was no other explanation for someone of her size being so heavy.        

Fuck Jakku and its hardships.

*

Rey woke up to the somewhat sour smell of the post office she’d remembered since childhood. To the sticky old linoleum under her toes. To handcuffs on her wrists. She did wake up, though — that counted for something, right?

But as she lifted her head her heart fell: the transmitter, broken nearly in half, was the very first thing she saw. It looked like it was hit with an axe or a—

He was sitting in front of her. The enforcer, Lor San Tekka’s murderer. Ren.

He… turned out to be younger than Rey’d assumed him to be. A thin, yet deep scar bisected Ren’s oddly proportioned face; his nose was sunburned, and he had dark circles under darker eyes. Attentive eyes, watching her watch him.

“Came for this?” he asked, nodding at the ruined transmitter. Not like he needed her answer. “You’re the traitor’s accomplice, then, the one who sent Phasma gallivanting through the eastern plateau. I’m impressed: persuasion is exceptionally hard to master without proper training. Are you? Untrained?”

Ren leaned forward in his rickety chair, bracing his forearms on his knees. There were a few feet between their chairs, but the sheer size of him was making Rey feel trapped — even more than the steel bracelet on each wrist. Above her, a fan was cutting the stuffy air with a strained  _ whoosh-whoosh-whoosh; _ Rey’s pulse caught its rhythm and her throat caught her voice.

“I’m just a scavenger,” she whispered. It was the wrong thing to say, Rey realized as soon as the words left her mouth. Ren’s expression shifted from mild curiosity to suspicion, and he leaned closer still.

“Are you now?”

*

To find a telepath in the same sand pit where Skywalker’s only known ally had lived — this couldn’t be a coincidence. The girl wasn’t helping the traitor by chance, there was  _ nothing _ random about it. It was—

“A ploy,” Leader Snoke’s voice said in Ren’s head, the recollection of its intonations so vivid Ren’s whole body jerked.

A ploy. Of course. He’d been missing— her. His uncle’s new student, no doubt, guarding Skywalker’s secrets. Had he looked in this scavenger’s future, too, and found her worthy of trust, unlike his own blood?

The thought and the memory that came with it worked as detonators, causing his ever-present rage to flare hot and high and blowing his rationality away.

Whatever trickery she had planned, bringing herself to him on a silver plate, she wouldn’t get a chance to follow through with it. He’d take every scrap of information she had in that pretty head of hers and send her after Lor San, the old fool who dared question him

_ “Was your Order worth sacrificing your own father to it?” _

Throwing one arm forward with the tightly controlled, snake-like movement, he pressed the heel of his ungloved palm to the girl’s forehead, his fingers spanning it from temple to temple. With the other, Ren reached for his sword’s hilt. Initially, he positioned the sheathed weapon behind him so that it didn’t scare the girl further. Now she might not have time to feel any fear.

_ Ah, yes _ , she was like him, to an extent, her recent memories photographically clear. His next destination, Ren plucked out of the girl’s head first — the string of symbols with Lor San Tekka’s and the traitor’s faces attached to it had practically jumped onto his tingling fingertips. Those were “coordinates,” how they were written in the early post-Blackout years when the drastically deformed terrain made it impossible to tell south from north and the satellites had still been down. Ren would smile at the elegance of the solution — nowadays it was as good as cipher for most people — had the name Skywalker not been plastered all over it.

Soon, Ren would be free of him.

_ This _ was the goal of Ren’s operation, of years of searching. To think that some nameless scavenger had the information dangled before him like that…. Could it be a trap, a distraction?

In one fluid motion he was up, dragging the chair the girl was cuffed to away from the windows. Not letting go of the sword, not bothering to conceal it anymore, and not stopping his descent into her mind. The lack of physical contact made the latter considerably harder but — to hell with the resulting fatigue.

Ren was so sure he’d find his uncle’s face somewhere among the recurring memories of sand, and daily heat, and nightly cold, and hunger.  _ Where is it? What are you hiding? _ Deep, deep down, there was an image of a verdant island caressed by salty winds. It was nothing more than a bright picture, though, a painted folding screen of a memory, and behind it—

The chair’s back met the far wall as Ren released his grip on it. The girl’s head swung forward — the motion made Ren’s world come off its axis.

*

The realization that Ren was going to kill her was drowned out by the black tide surging through Rey’s head. When his fingertips had first grazed her hairline, it resembled a nip of static, but then he started up and—

Rey had never seen the ocean but somehow knew this was how beating against high waves felt— except— with her mind. Afraid that the waves— that  _ Ren _ would carry her away, she fought, if trying to arm-wrestle with the tide could be called fighting.

What was he doing to her?

Suddenly, there was the island,  _ her _ island. The black waves were running towards its shores, and Rey was  _ not _ having it. She pushed, for the waves became a wall, a mirror of liquid darkness, a window with the raging storm on the other side of it. Rey kept pushing against it, against a reflection in it that wasn’t hers, but Ren’s. And then she fell through it, tipping the world on its side and sinking into the turbulent waters.

Down, down as a stone, through screams muffled by the water or by a gag, through bursts of bubbles filled with memories too sad to be Ren’s, and towards a voice. Neither Rey’s nor Ren’s, it was speaking of hatred, Rey understood, even though she didn’t knew the tongue. It was supposed to be a war drum spurring Ren on, leading him to victory. Instead—

If someone tried to steal water from the junkyard pump, Plutt would bind them to it for the night, with their head strapped under the dripping tap. By dawn, the poor sod would be half-mad.

_ That’s _ what it was.

“You’re afraid you’ll go insane because you’re not strong enough,” Rey gasped — and surfaced with a sharp inhale, the sea salt on her lips. The room was cast in shadows — for how long had she been under? — and Ren was looking at her like he’d seen a ghost. He muttered something under his breath and… looked at his sword, still in its sheath. It was a long look.

Rey gulped, and a salty metallic taste filled her mouth.  _ Oh _ . Blood trickled from her nose, and she was shaking violently, her teeth clattering. The returning awareness of her own body — and this otherworldly cold — reawakened Rey’s fear of death.

That was when Ren threw the sword down. It landed with a thud, and Rey couldn’t take her eyes away from it, its sheath — black as tar — so alien against the dingy linoleum, this dingy room, this dingy town. Much like its owner.

When she looked at Ren, he was standing by the open door with his back to her, the one hand Rey could see gripping the door frame, white-knuckled. He was talking to someone in the other room in a low urgent voice. Unable to distinguish the words, having no idea what had just happened between them, and terrifyingly unsure what was to happen next, Rey… stared.  _ So out of place _ , she thought, breathing shallowly. All these dark colors and likely bulletproof materials. Neck-length black hair.

Ren turned, and stepped back to her, and dropped Rey’s boots in her lap. He took the handcuffs’ bracelets off her wrists. The right one. The left one.

“Get out of here.”

Rey didn’t move, gaping.

“You’re no longer of interest to the First Order,” Ren gritted out, nostrils flaring. “Get. Out.”

That got her going. Clasping her boots to her chest, she shot out of the room — or she tried to. The world was spinning. On unsteady legs, Rey hobbled through the dimly lit corridor, out of the back door, and onto back streets. Nobody stopped her as she left the town behind. Rey managed maybe ten feet up the dune nearest to the stone plate holding Tuanul, when her stomach turned. After, as she was gulping down the air, a number of things dawned on Rey.

Somehow, she was still alive.

She still wasn’t wearing her boots, having dropped them a couple paces down the dune, but neither her feet nor her palms, splayed on the sand, had been burned yet.

The sun was gone, half of the sky covered by a cloud the color of a bad bruise, and ribbons of cold winds were snaking from the west. R’iia’s breath had reached the shore and was rolling towards Jakku, and Rey hadn’t gotten to to Finn.

A few pink drops slid down her chin — tears mixed with dried blood. At least her nose had stopped bleeding. Rey stood up. And pressed forward.

*

To his horror, Ren kept feeling her long after she’d run off. As he sat, head in hands, on the chair the girl had been sitting on, he felt her stumbling out of town, felt her retching, felt a flash of despair go through her. He felt her tears and her determination. Finally, the connection was dampened by the distance, and Ren risked moving, his vision no longer swimming.

Out of all his recent…  _ missteps _ , this one took the prize. To dive head-first into the mind of someone he’d believed had been studying under his uncle! Had she not been a… self-taught desert rat, but, instead, a trained telepath, she could’ve ripped all of Ren’s secrets out of his brain and turned him into a drooling husk in the process. Ren basically invited her to come cripple him, leaving himself open like that.

But the girl — Rey — wasn’t Skywalker’s student. She was nobody, and she had merely disturbed some old wounds and grasped onto the obvious fear. The incantation was the real problem: it had been distorted and jerky like a broken record ever since he killed Lor San, but the girl’s intrusion had torn through what was left of it. If Ren couldn’t get the rhythm right on his own before, now the whole thing felt… foreign to him.

He remembered the words being intoned by the susurrus of Leader Snoke’s voice, but it was as if Ren had never spoken Sith himself, his tongue thick and bumping into his teeth on the wrong syllables. He could barely recall how it was supposed to  _ be _ . Something of sorts had happened a few times before, when Ren had been away on the Order’s business for too long and let the incantation fade in his inability to stay focused without Leader Snoke’s wise guidance. Just another evidence of how deeply flawed his mind and, by extension, his abilities were.

He hated it. Their kind’s brains tended to work as fucking electronic memory keepers; Ren hadn’t seen his m— General Organa of the Resistance for ten years, but the warmth of her palms on his shoulder blades from the very last time she hugged him had haunted him still. Yet when it came to something truly important — here he was.  _ Useless. _

In his agitation, Ren was making the windows rattle and paint peel off the walls.

He needed to hurry and get back to the base as Leader Snoke had ordered. Ren was no good without the incantation: unbalanced, wild. Besides… he had already gotten what he came to Jakku for in the first place, hadn’t he?

The prospect of starting the incantation from scratch was making Ren’s left eye twitch — damn the girl for condemning him to it. But finding her must’ve been fate.

Letting her go, however…. It wasn’t a wise decision, obviously, but neither were his other options. To bend the girl down as she slumped on this very chair and take her head off before she even fully returned to herself? Or to bring her with him as a prisoner, only for Leader Snoke to order Ren to execute her for assisting the enemies of the Order? That would be a waste of abilities, potential, and life, so, no.  _ No _ .

Leader Snoke would inevitably find out about the girl, but if it happened even just a bit  _ later _ , in the wake of their victory, then, perhaps, Ren would be able to redirect his master’s wrath onto himself. Perhaps… he’d be allowed to return here and find her to— To do  _ what _ , exactly? Ren shook his head, weary. He was wasting time.

_ You didn’t have the guts to kill her. Admit it. Move on. _

“Gather everyone and send word to the captain!” he snarled, startling an officer waiting for him in the next room. “We’re leaving.”

“S-sir!” The officer caught up with him when Ren was already turning his speeder. “Our frequency is— is silent. The technicians say the upcoming storm is blocking out the signal from the TIEs.”

Ren cursed under his breath, the word turned into static by his riding helmet’s speaker. Another one of general Hux’s brilliant ideas! To lock all their field communications on  _ one _ frequency, heavily dependent on the technology developed by his personal team of sycophants.  _ Terrestrially Impenetrable Emissary _ satellites by the incompetence-embodying ginger fuck.  _ Why not, indeed? _

“Fine,” Ren said through gritted teeth, “set the course to the east, we’ll find the captain on the plateau.” Still, the officer lingered. “Anything else?”

“T-the girl, sir. How am I to refer to her in the r—”

Ren tightened his grip on the steering, and the officer’s hands flew up. His own collar suddenly started to strangle him.

“You aren’t going to mention the girl at all,” Ren pressed, taking hold of the officer’s mind as well.

“I’m not going to mention the girl,” the officer wheezed and dashed away.

After that Ren had to lower his head and wait for black spots to dissipate from his vision. Too much for one bloody day. When he finally hit the ignition, the sound of it was swallowed by the rapidly approaching storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How's your weekend going? :D
> 
> Let me know what you think in the comments or come say hi to me on tumblr - my side blog for SW and other fandom stuff is lilibeth-with-starwars-flavour. 
> 
> Also, a big big thank you to everyone who commented on the previous chapters, bookmarked, subscribed or left kudos. It really means a lot to me. <3


	5. Anomalies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a huge thank you to fulcrum_of_pemberley <3

_ “There really is no solid explanation for why Jakku is… as it is. The desertification came as a result of the severe climate change, but the heat? The storms? Why does it only demagnetize smaller devices? What is the deal with its roads? But most importantly, what is wrong with the Republic’s policy regarding this land? The bureaucratic hell of  _ our _ legal system forces  _ our _ citizens to live in a literal hell slash dump. I ask you, for how much longer?” _

\- A fragment of a late-night radio show.

~*~

R’iia’s breath hit Jakku with the full force of an extreme weather anomaly. Just as Rey reached the plateau, taking a shortcut to the radio tower, the wind that had been getting colder in the past half hour gusted, sending the back wheel of her speeder sideways. The vehicle wobbled, staying upright by a miracle, and crushed a bush under its tires.

Finn had a compass on his wrist but it had been pointing south for a while, so, back in her trailer, Rey had instructed him to simply head toward the Outer Rim. The tower was perched on a russet slope where the mountain range met the plateau. A thorn-covered stone shoulder obscured most of the tower’s height from view, but its bright red top was easily detectable once you came close enough to the Rim. That was what Rey was looking for as she gripped the speeder’s jerking steering.

A flash of lightning sucked the color out of the world, rendering it black, and white, and black again. In a brief moment of un-movement, the tower top pierced the sky like a glowing needle. Then browns, and grays, and the scraped neon orange of Rey’s speeder rushed back in, thunder, sand and pounding rain on their wake. She was only able to outrun the storm for two or three minutes before it swallowed her, making Rey stop the speeder with a sharp turn and scurry away from it in the mud.

She sprang up with a furious growl but immediately doubled over under the inrush of rain. Handfuls of wet sand were battering against her body like small angry fists and murky water was starting to seep under her goggles.  _ So cold! _

That was it. She would never intercept Finn, wouldn’t even find him. Approaching the tower during the thunderstorm would be insane; Finn wouldn’t act so stupidly and neither should she. The only hope she had left was that he had found a refuge. If he was still alive, that is. She needed a refuge, too, lest R’iia breathe Rey’s soul in and carry it all the way back to the ocean. As defeated as Rey felt, — and as much as she yearned to see the mighty waves, — holing up in a cave was more preferable. So, before what was left of her stamina was washed away, Rey ran.

*

Captain Phasma caught up with Ren’s people as they were leaving the sand pit, so now it was just the matter of picking up the squad of ‘troopers guarding the radio tower — and the Order could leave this miserable place.

He forgot his gloves in the damn town. The wind was getting toothy.

As thunder rolled over the Order’s heavy trucks and the speeders flanking them, the convoy came to a halt, toggling the engines to the oil-mod and rolling the speeders inside the trucks to be protected from the thunderstorm by their non-conductive superficies. Ren was about to dismount his own speeder when his awareness of the girl kicked back in. She was but a tiny blip on his mind’s radar, but she was  _ here _ , somewhere, close enough for Ren to feel the same grim determination coming from her as before.

What was she doing out in the middle of the storm the locals were so afraid of? She… couldn’t be going towards the transmitter under the tower, could she? Not in this weather! He knew Rey was neither stupid, nor suicidal —  _ he was in her head _ . But— the urge to find her and  _ make sure _ she stayed away from the blasted tower was so strong Ren was maneuvering between the trucks before he even fully acknowledged what he was doing.

Kids’ trick for disappearing: people in the front vehicle think you’re in the back one and vice versa.

A few minutes after the convoy had continued on, Ren’s speeder emerged from a particularly thick tangle of vegetal needles that passed for bush in Jakku. Driving was getting harder and harder still; the speeder kept lurching to the side under the wind’s incessant onslaught, and the plateau’s meager, salty soil was turning into liquid mud beneath its wheels. But before Ren could curse himself and change his course, something bright caught his eye.

Another speeder. That one, Ren hadn’t seen prior to this moment, but it could only be Rey’s. Lying on its side, it was shining like an orange beacon among the sea of thorns and twigs. It was already half-covered in wet sand — a bit longer and Ren wouldn’t’ve noticed it at all.

It did feel like fate.

More certain of where to go next, more aware of Rey, Ren sent his speeder towards the mountains.

*

She should’ve stayed put. Skin-burning salts be damned, she should’ve just lain down, covered her head, and waited for the storm to end as people in the slums did when R’iia was tearing their houses to the ground. But Rey got scared of passing out from exhaustion and drowning in the mud, so she had been moving, and moving, and moving forward until her drenched clothes and backpack became too heavy and her legs gave way under her.

Now, as Rey sat on her heels, raised ground growing into looming slopes around her, she was more annoyed at herself than scared. There was a twinge of sadness — no one would find her here, ever — but mostly there was cold. Rey’s fingers were turning bluish.

After she’d fallen down under the weight of her own skull, either hypothermia or the mud would claim her. Chemicals in the soil would lick her bones clean and the sand — when it’d be dry and hot again — would polish them. Maybe they’d end up on an altar or in an amulet made by the next old Tekka.

Between the howling wind and her clattering teeth, Rey hadn’t heard a roar coming from above. When she did lift her drowsy eyelids, it was too late. Paralyzed, she watched a rockslide tear along the mountainside; then a roaring sound of a different kind invaded her ears. Rey got a mouthful of dirt and breathed in unwonted gasoline fumes, and someone whose grip was like steel plucked her out of the mud by her backpack. Her chest hit a speeder’s steering, and a robotic-sounding voice ordered Rey to hold on, so she did.

Then there was cursing. Screeching of metal. Darkness.

*

Darkness greeted Rey when she woke up. She was lying on the hard ground, — stone under the thin layer of sand — but the air around her was still.  _ A cave? _ Although Rey felt quite miserable, sore all over, her head pounding, she wasn’t shaking so badly anymore. Distantly, she wondered where her backpack went: it had disappeared from her back. Rey’s upper body was covered by something heavy and smelling of…  _ deodorant? Fancy. _

A jacket, it was a jacket. A big one. Whose—

Rey scrambled into a sitting position and away from the thing, eyes wild. Somehow, she knew to whom it belonged.

“You aren’t concussed, I take it.” Ren’s deep voice came from the shadows.

Rey kept backing away. Ren sighed.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

As Rey’s sight adjusted to the lack of light, she was able to make out his massive form by the cave’s wall. Ren was sitting with his back to it, his hands lifted in a gesture of surrender. His palms were wide and so pale they almost glowed in the dark.

“How— How are you here?” Rey rasped.

“I caught your presence through the telepathic field,” he said slowly, as if moving his tongue was taking effort, “and something pushed me to… seek you out. I’m not much of a foreseer, but what little I have turned out to be… enough.”

Rey’s initial fear abated, somewhat, in the face of her bewilderment. She couldn’t sense any hostility from Ren, and his words sounded like gibberish — or so she told herself. All of it was… beyond strange.

“Enough for what?”

Instead of answering, he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.

Rey followed the gesture and— Her stomach dropped. She stood up unsteadily. It wasn’t a wall Ren was sitting by — it was a rockslide’s paunch; sandstone boulders the size of her torso, branches, roots, and chunks of clay were clogging the cave’s mouth. It all came back to her, then. The rockslide. The speeder: there it was, on its side, half-buried under the debris. The inhuman “hold on”…. That must’ve come from Ren’s helmet, now lying between his outstretched legs.

“How long was I out?” Out of the cacophony of questions in Rey’s head, this one was the easiest. A tiny patch of the night sky peered between two enormous boulders high up under the cave’s roof; the storm had passed. Rey stepped forward against her better judgement.

“A couple hours, maybe more. Not sure, I was in and out of it, too.”

Now that Rey came closer she couldn’t help but notice that Ren’s face looked so pale as to be bloodless; his helmet was dented, a wide scratch running down its matte black surface.  _ Oh. _

The roof opening between the rocks seemed inaccessible, and, even if she managed to reach it by clawing at clay, it was too narrow. The scavenger — the crawler, the climber — in Rey immediately  _ nope _ d away from the idea, so she cautiously sat on her haunches in front of Ren —  _ no sudden movements, the man’s a beast, remember _ — and asked another question.

“Your people will look for you, right?”

“They will once they realize I—” He fell silent, moving his lips in a way that made him look embarrassed, of all things, and mused: “Whether they’ll be able to  _ find _ me…. A while ago, I threw away the trackers from my gear, couldn’t stand the signal’s hissing.”

“Uh… huh.” Ren’s eyes became momentarily unfocused. He was probably concussed pretty badly, so it made sense that he didn’t make sense, yet Rey was determined to get as much as possible out of him. “Your phone…?”

“Broken.” He nodded at the speeder: some things had spilled out of a torn saddlebag, the utterly destroyed phone among them.

“Shit.”

“Indeed.” Ren massaged his temples. “Listen. There’s a full canteen. It’ll last the two of us a day and a half—”

_ The two of us, huh? _

Ren pinned her down with a glare.

“Being found by the Order in any proximity to my dead body is not something I’d recommend. So, a day and a half. Then I— I’ll figure something out. I just need to... rest. Can I?”

It took Rey a bit to understand that Ren was waiting for her to answer. Gods and spirits, was he weird.

“I won’t hurt you, either,” she said at last.

Slowly, Ren lay on his side. Standing up, Rey thought she heard him mutter a quiet “thank you,” but that might’ve been a whisper of the drying clay.

*

The cave was less than ten steps from wall to wall, damp and chilly from gulping down the storm. Rey was moving clockwise along its perimeter, palm grazing stones clad in shadows, until what appeared to be a particularly dark corner turned into empty air under her fingertips. Rey snatched her hand back as if the emptiness had grabbed her.

A crack.

That gave her the much needed courage to rummage through Ren’s saddlebags. His speeder was, quite literally, saddled with the stuff Rey the garbage picker would’ve fought for with her nails and teeth. He had  _ toiletries _ ; utensils from real steel, a fork  _ and _ a spoon; an actual hunting knife, too.

His flashlight was powerful but the crack was deep, splitting the rock further than the beam could reach. That, in itself, wasn’t surprising: these mountains were one giant termite mound, with miles upon miles of tunnels to wander through and die in. Being so close to one, however…. Goosebumps running up her spine, Rey returned to the speeder.

They were damn lucky it hadn’t blown up. Who in their right mind used oil-based fuel? The speeder was a hybrid, though, so it was a shame that its rear got smashed. Looking at it, Rey was torn between the urges to fix it or to tear away everything of value. The remaining tire was so wide Rey could curl inside of it and fall asleep….

Grumbling under her breath and giving the speeder wistful side glances, she pulled a disk of synthetic coil from the pile of Ren’s belongings. It was about a third of the tire’s diameter, as thick as Rey’s four fingers, and wrapped in a better fabric than her best shirt was made of.  _ Damn Firsts! _ In Jakku, you’d have to chew sand for a full quarter in order to save enough credits to buy a syntcoil — and it’d be a palm-wide spongy piece only lasting for a week. Ren had probably had this one for months and it wasn’t anywhere near burning out.

Grumbling intensifying, Rey placed the syntcoil in the center of the cave and hit its scratched ebony surface with a stone. The scratches bloomed to life, bathing the small circle of space with a faint orange light. As the rest of the wheel warmed up, Rey let out a shaky breath.  _ Good. _ Some things were still good.

“Hey.” Reluctantly, she shook Ren by the boot. He didn’t steer. “Hey!” A poke to the knee — nothing. On the third “hey” Rey touched his wrist, and before she could as much as blink Ren seized hers. He didn’t reach for the sword lying beside his head, but his grip was like iron and therefore scary as hell.

“What?”

“I— I lit the coil,” Rey said, pushing the fear down. “Come closer.”

She surprised him — Rey felt uncannily certain of it. Ren let go of her with an apologetic-sounding murmur and moved into the circle of warmth, not bothering to take the sword with him — which surprised  _ her _ . Not that she was going to remind him about the weapon….

Ren sagged back to the ground with a mighty sigh. His head lolled to the side, revealing a large darkening bruise. In the light of the syntcoil, his forehead glistered with perspiration. He was getting worse, then.

Doing her best to  _ not _ think about potentially lethal brain injuries, Rey busied her hands with the contents of her backpack. The state of things was… sorry. The backpack’s material wasn’t waterproof, so, aside from Rey’s spare clothes, instruments, and a few baubles, now it was filled with the annual norm of weather anomalies. The flapjacks were  _ gone _ . Only Rey’s thin blanket had stayed relatively dry: it was underneath everything else, rolled up in the tight bundle.

_ Scorched pile of lizard shit! _

She needed to get out of her wet rags. If Ren had been right about the time, it wasn’t even past midnight — more than six hours until the sun would rise and drag the temperature along. Rey was already testing her body’s limits. If—  _ When _ the First Order found them…. Well, to survive a near-death experience for the third time in a row, only to die from pneumonia a week later because she couldn’t afford the medicine, would be a huge bummer.

Checking if Ren was still asleep, Rey shimmied out of her clothes (denim, coarse linen, and lots of extra pockets sewn nearly on top of one another would take forever to dry) and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders.

… It did fucking nothing. She sat in her blanket, her pants and shirts on the ground as close to the syntcoil as it was possible without singing them, and shivered. The blanket had been good enough for the nights in her trailer. In this stone bag, it felt as weightless as starlight. Guiltily, Rey looked behind her. Ren’s jacket was where she had dropped it earlier. It  _ was _ waterproof. Dry where it counted.

_ Nope. Nuh-uh. _

Leathery on the outside, with the soft lining, tight wristbands, and high collar. So big Rey could fasten it around her bent knees.

_ No. _

It smelled nice. Burying her nose in the jacket’s collar, Rey decided to wait on being mad at herself until after she hadn’t died.

*

They lived by a lake, once.

Uncle Luke built him a raft from smooth, whitened pieces of wood. It was tied to their deck and Ben’s parents couldn’t take him off of it for days on end. One day, he drifted off to sleep, and the raft came untied and drifted too far from the shore. His father had to swim after it and tow it back home. Ben was bawling his eyes out, sunburned and freezing.

Ren didn’t have any tears left, but the feeling of being cold while burning up was the same. He was drifting in and out again. The cave, the raft, the cave, the raft. The shore and the girl on it, protected by the green of her island and the warmth of his jacket. Every time he drifted closer to her, the delirium looped, and he drifted, and drifted, and drifted, forever too far, his head oh-so heavy with the wet sand.

The cave.

The raft.

He just wanted to stand on the shore again.

*

Rey fell asleep with her chin to her knees and dreamed of longing. As she jerked awake sometime after midnight, her neck was stiff and her legs numb. Ren was restless, limbs twitching like a dog’s. What was she supposed to do, sit and listen to him grunt and whimper? Wary of his snake-fast hands, Rey reached out and touched his sweaty forehead. She didn’t need to, to tell he was running a fever, but that was what people did; not to her, but she knew the gesture, so—  

Ren’s hair was soft.

Wiping her hand on his jacket, Rey stomped to the speeder, muscles tingling and cool air licking up her bare legs. The jacket covered everything that needed to be covered, reaching her mid-thigh, but damn, did she want to pull her pants back on. She felt them with her foot as she returned to the syntcoil with the canteen and the med kit from one of Ren’s bags. More or less dry from one side — damp from the other because the ground was damp, too, though warm, thanks to the syntcoil. Everything else was in the similar state: her boots, her underwear — everything.  _ Fuck you, R’iia. _

Resigned, she sank to her knees at Ren’s side and unzipped the med kit. Some meds looked familiar. Others… not so much.

“Would it kill you to keep the boxes?” Rey muttered. There  _ was _ a bright yellow logo she’d definitely seen before, and the powder inside the papery package gave off the distinctive smell of fake citrus. Hoping it was, indeed, a febrifuge and not something to, say, keep bugs away from the actual medicines in the small herbal-smelling envelopes, Rey emptied the package into the canteen’s cap and carefully mixed it with a sip of water.  _ Would have to do. _

“Ren. Ren, you hear?”

He probably didn’t, though his eyebrows creased slightly. Shaking him didn’t do much: the fever was holding him under.

“Don’t squeeze my bones, okay?” Rey said at last, lifting his head and wedging her knee under his upper back. Making an unconscious man swallow a lump of sticky powder, it turned out, wasn’t easy. “C’mon, Enforcer.” She forced his mouth open and shoved the febrifuge in, covering his lips, now smeared with the medicine, with her palm. “Don’t you dare gag!”

With a strangled moan, Ren swallowed. Rey allowed him a few greedy gulps before lifting the heavy aluminum canteen to her own lips. She was… confused. The Rey from the previous morning would have spat on Ren’s limp body. He brought violence to her home, — Jakku had always been temporary, but it was  _ her _ temporary, — he killed someone she’d known since she was a child. Yet….

His helmet was bent, his speeder - crushed. And Rey was alive.

“Why would you do it?” She found herself murmuring, Ren’s head still in her lap, the softness of his hair under her searching fingers.

Rey stayed where she was until his breathing evened.


	6. Awareness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, the biggest "thank you" goes to fulcrum_of_pemberley

_ “My dearest, _

_ I hope that this package has found you without any trouble — and that this watch will meet your needs. It shows calendar and moon months, although the latter might not be so accurate in the light of changes our planet is undergoing. Let it serve you well and count every second of your lasting loyalty to the Emperor as I count every second away from you. _

_ There is an engraving on the inside of the back lid, away from prying eyes. Think of me when you look at it, my love, my Anakin. _

_ Our twins are all well and snug under my heart. Yesterday, I felt one of them kick for the first time. So feisty! I wish—” _

\- Her last letter.

~*~

Ren woke up to the rumbling of his stomach, the cave clad in early morning gray. He was covered by his jacket and there was a folded thin blanket underneath his upper body. His headache was a notch — a deep notch — more splitting than usual, but otherwise he felt… fine. Thirsty, though, some nasty taste in his mouth, and hungry like— like Rey, rumbling in unison with him but not letting it disturb her sleep in a cocoon of clothing. It looked like she was wearing not one, but two pairs of denim pants. Huh.

The syntcoil became dormant without the chemical reaction being spurred, so the cave had grown chilly again. It faced west — hours would pass until the sun rolled over the mountains and peeked into the opening in the rockslide to warm the air.

The opening. Igniting the syntcoil once more, Ren winced at the memory of yanking a rock down on his own dumb head. The adrenalin had made him feel drunk and, worse, — unstoppable. He’d unleashed his powers in the general direction of the stones, and dirt, and roots that had nearly buried the two of them mere minutes prior. He’d meant to move them before they settled. His body…  _ stopped _ just as the boulder high above him came loose. He should’ve let it be. He pulled. Blood vessels in Ren’s brain spasmed — clearly, he’d long since surpassed his twenty-four hour limit of using his abilities — and it was as if the telekinesis had been switched off by the flip of a switch. Ren had dropped the boulder. Had he not left his helmet on for its night visor, the hit would’ve dented Ren’s head.

He’d been acting rashly, unraveling, ever since Lor San Tekka’s last words had reached his eardrums. It could’ve cost him his life or his sanity three times now — his mindlessness of Rey’s skills during the interrogation, the ride through the thunderstorm, the  _ bloody boulder _ — but it hadn’t which was… more luck than he’d ever been granted in his thirty years. So was he stumbling around like a fool — or being led by fate, after all?

Rey stirred and looked up at him with bleary eyes. They regarded each other in silence. Then Ren moved to find something to eat. She kept watching him, but there was no fear in the telepathic field.  _ Good _ . Ren never saw the appeal of being on the receiving end of the emotion. Idly, he thought of completely withdrawing from the field for a time to let his body finish recovering, but reading Rey didn’t seem to draw from his strength at all. In fact,  _ blocking _ his abilities appeared like more of a bother.

_ Interesting. _

“You didn’t touch my rations,” Ren stated out loud, sorting through cans of meat porridge and mixed vegetables. He didn’t have many left, but even if there were cases of cans and a whole army of vacuum packaged crackers, it’d be apparent Rey didn’t as much as breathe in the food’s direction. While everything else was thoroughly  _ scavenged _ through, the rations remained where they’d been in the not torn saddle bag.

“Well, they’re yours,” Rey grumbled. “I drank water but the food— You didn’t say anything about it.”

Ren was about to retort that if he was okay with her drinking his water, obviously, he was okay her eating his rations, too, when a glimpse of a memory flashed before his eyes, making him bite his tongue.

It wasn’t a scene, just an image of two small hands straining to move someone’s bigger fingers clasping a piece of smoked meat Rey had worked her hands bloody to buy. The feeling of utter powerlessness in the face of injustice coloring the memory made bile boil in Ren’s throat. He had seen it during the interrogation but brushed it off as not important: there were  _ dozens _ of such memories bleeding together.

“Don’t be offended, okay?” Rey said, misinterpreting his tense stillness. “I had my own food.”

Again, he didn’t have to make a conscious effort to taste insipid bread ruined by rain water. Striding back to the syntcoil, Ren all but pressed the spoon and a can of pearl barley with pork into her belatedly opened palms.

Rey wouldn’t look at him as he sat opposite her with another can of porridge. Her loose mousy hair was hiding her face from view but he didn’t need to see her to— Ren withdrew from the telepathic field after all. Rey’s share of acrid memories was about food. His was of privacy.

*

Rey was not sniffing over the can, she was— She was sniffing the porridge. It was good. Chemically balanced to the brim according to its label, so easy to chew, so rich, and spicy, and  _ good,  _ Rey had to force herself to eat slowly lest she be sick and waste all that goodness.

She thought Ren’d gotten angry but…. Rey stole a glance at him while polishing the spoon. He already finished eating and was examining the canteen’s cap. Rey bit her lip; she had cleaned the cap as best as she could without wasting water but the fake citrus smell lingered. The water probably smelled of it too, now.

“Ah. This explains why the fever broke so soon.” Ren didn’t seem angry or annoyed, turning the cap in his long fingers. “Thank you, Rey.”

She started.

“You’re… welcome. Thank you, too.” She lifted the can and nearly smacked her forehead with it: this was not what she was ought to thank him for! The question tumbled out of her mouth before she could rearrange it into words of gratitude:

“Why did you save me?”  

He took his time before answering.

“Because you’re like me.”

“I’m  _ not.” _

“You know you are.”

“I don’t know anything.” Nervous, Rey pulled the canteen towards her and took a short sip. She could only avoid thinking about what had happened in the post office for so long, but if acknowledging it meant she had to admit she and Ren of the First Order were alike… she could put it off for a little longer.

“And I don’t have another answer.” Ren shot her a loaded look but didn’t press further, squatting beside the speeder to check its torn saddlebag.

She  _ was _ like him, wasn’t she? Down to the searing, poisonous like a lead shard stuck under the skin memory of— No.

Ren  _ tsk _ ed, tugging at a strap showing from underneath the rocks by the speeder. Muttering a barely audible “...early,” he stepped back from the blockage and raised his hands. Nothing seemed to happen at first. Then tiny vibrations came through the ground and into Rey’s spine, making shorter hairs on her nape stand up. With the sharp twist of Ren’s left hand, a large rock popped out from clay near the ground. A swing of his right arm sent a rolled up sleeping bag, dirty and kind of squashed, flying into Rey’s midsection. A few smaller rocks rustled down but the blockage at large remained undisturbed.

Rey gaped.  _ That _ she absolutely couldn’t do, whatever Ren believed. He glanced at her, pale, yet smug, eyebrows lifted slightly. Rey turned away.  _ Show off! _

The morning shifted into noon as imperceptibly as the dunes shift, burying paths and bones. Rey finished her porridge and let the blissful sensation of fullness lull her to sleep. When she opened her eyes hours later, Ren had a paper map lain out on a stain of sunlight on the ground. He was kneeling near it, face lifted towards the opening in the blockage, and squinted at the visible edge of the sun disk, holding something up on the flat of his palm.

“What are you doing?” Rey croaked, sitting up.

“Trying to figure out where we are, exactly.” He drew a circle on the map — with a fountain pen! Who was he, a fairytale scholar? — and showed Rey an old-fashioned wrist watch he was holding.

“No way!” Rey crawled closer on hands and knees. “How’s it still ticking? Jakku hates compasses  _ and _ watches — we only use solar ones!” 

“It’s mechanic.” There was a hint of amusement to Ren’s voice as he dropped the watch into Rey’s eagerly outstretched hand.

She must’ve seemed ridiculous to him, true, but the golden clock hands and the worn leather strap looked straight out of a storybook. Falling into a bottomless rabbit hole while looking at your watch instead of where you’re going; peeking into the future through turns of cogwheels…. A thing like that didn’t belong in Jakku  _ or _ in the First Order. It was just the thing to wear under soft sleeves, to wind up over breakfast on mornings wrapped in mist. Something from another world, another time.

“It’s very old, yes?”

Ren hummed, agreeing.

“Belonged to my grandfather.”

“To the Emperor’s adviser? To Vader?” Rey asked, enraptured by the clock face, but as the last word left her mouth, she gasped, looking up in horror. Everybody knew that name, but her knowledge of Ren sharing blood with Vader came from the former’s head. From the post office.  _ Shit! _

Surprise flashed through Ren’s eyes, making him look younger, but was quickly overshadowed by the immense smugness. 

“Yes.” A smirk tugged at his lips. “So, you  _ are _ aware of your gifts. Or, at least, you  _ became _ aware of them.”

Rey bit her tongue, staring at the clock hands as if she could make them take the last minute back by the sheer petulance of her frown.

“Don’t look at it like that, it’s not the watch who talked you into a corner.” As Ren took the wristwatch back from her and put it in his jacket’s inner pocket, Rey considered not talking to him ever again just in case. He distracted her, though, by pointing at the opening. “I don’t suppose you can squeeze through it?”

And that was how Rey found herself balancing on Ren’s shoulders, gripping the opening’s lower edge.

“Nah, not good,” she grunted, pulling her body up to see further. She stood on her tiptoes and Ren’s hands tightened around her ankles. “It’s like a bottleneck but from sandstone. My shoulders won’t fit, I don’t think, not to mention— the rest.”

Ren got a handful of “the rest” when she was jumping down. Rey didn’t notice, not really, until she picked up that  _ he _ did. Notice. Her palms were tingling, and suddenly she became acutely aware of the way she smelled — distracting, feminine, warm. Which… yeah. This was not what usually came to her mind after a few days’ worth of sweating, so the thought could only come from—

Ren cleared his throat.

“We don’t have another choice, then.” At Rey’s unspoken question, he nodded at the crack in the cave’s wall, that maw gaping with darkness among translucent afternoon shadows.

“Wha—? In there?! No, no no no.” Rey backed away, strange sensations forgotten.

“The canteen’s half empty, Rey. We have to search for a way out.”

“But you said… your people….”

“They  _ will _ look for me once they realize I’m gone. But it’s not unusual for me to go off the radar for weeks on end.”

“So you propose — what? To crawl in there and wander in the dark ‘til we’re mad from thirst?!”

“To at least try to save ourselves while we have water and energy.”

“Ren—” Rey inhaled through her mouth. He hadn’t raised his voice yet, but his frustration was making itself at home in the pit of her stomach. And his words…. There was logic to them. However, something felt off. Behind the logic hid… urgency she couldn’t quite understand. He was right to fear the water running out, but it wasn’t solely about that. “These caves… it’s a labyrinth,” she said, shaking her head uncertainly. “The Firsts might still—” 

“Rey,” he echoed her, stepping forward and looking intently in her eyes, “it may be a labyrinth, but the springs that feed local wells stem from these very mountains. I know it all freaks you out — trust me, I share the sentiment. But if we go in there we might have a chance. Here—If we stay, hoping that someone will come back for us, the only thing that’ll come will be our death. You know it.”

Rey managed a tight nod, breaking eye contact. Her vocal cords refused to work, paralyzed by the words Ren had chosen. By how they reverberated through the marrow of her bones.

Ren exhaled, relieved.

“Don’t be afraid, I—”

Rey silenced him by planting her palm in the middle of his chest. “You say I’m like you,” she whispered, contemplating her calloused fingers atop leathery fabric.

“You are.”

“Okay. Read into my mind without my permission again, and I’ll start reading into yours.” With that and a cold stare from underneath her eyebrows, Rey pushed him back. Sort of. Slapped his solar plexus. Ren didn’t move an inch, but, judging by his sullen expression, the point was taken.

*

Oh, but he was a hypocrite. So quick to disregard her  _ privacy _ when it stood in his way. Away from the Order it was almost too easy to forget what kind of man he was, and he didn’t have the incantation to remind him, but… a snake is a snake.

He wasn’t leaving her, though, and time was of the essence. Ren winced, remembering how the exact same words sounded in his master’s voice. He’d already wasted too many precious hours — too many sips from the canteen — to slow down and be tactful.

As Ren unfastened the intact saddle bag from the speeder and started to jam everything that would and wouldn’t fit into it, it occurred to him that, as a telepath, Rey was better than she knew — and far better than he’d given her credit for. If just now she had sensed him using the ability on her — and he had barely brushed her thought with his own — then yesterday, in that spit of a town, she didn’t tumble into his mind because Ren had recklessly left himself open. She intruded into it in self-defense, being no less strong than he.

Which meant — Ren groaned internally — that Rey’d been as aware of him, soul and body, as he of her.  _ Fantastic _ .

Concentrating on zipping the bag shut, he closed his mind, too (which took considerably less effort; the bag’s seams appeared on the verge of bursting). Rey’s opinion of him already was far below the sea level — and rightfully so. But there was no need to lower it further by unwittingly making her privy to this… craving.

He had held her for a couple of heartbeats as he helped her get down from his shoulders, layers of clothing bunching up under his palms. But maybe it started even before that. Maybe his body had been craving committing her form to its muscle memory since the moment he lifted her from the dust in that alleyway.

He wanted to hold her again.  _ Pathetic, Ren. _ He was.

“Can’t you just lift it up?” Rey asked, full backpack between her bent knees. It took Ren an embarrassingly long moment to align his line of thought with the current reality.

“It’s a rockslide,” he managed.

“I thought this… force of yours was all about lifting rocks!”

“I—No.” This force of his, his ass. Ren could bet she shared his telekinetic powers, too, but — okay. Small steps. “Not  _ rockslides _ . There’s a direct proportionality between your physical strength and—And you’re actually listening. Changed your mind?” She was listening. Talking to him, even. He hadn’t thought she would; the “ _ someone will come back _ ” was a very hurtful string to play at.

“You done?” Rey stood up, abruptly, and turned to the crack. “Let’s move already! I’ll go nuts if we tarry.”

“Yeah, I’m done.” Ren brushed past her, slinging the bag over his shoulder, its too long strap over his sword’s sheath, helmet at his hip. He glanced back as he approached the crack. Rey wasn’t following him. She was standing in the splotch of sun, looking up wistfully at the burnt out blue between the boulders, suspended in the ray of light like a moth in amber. Suspended in time.

_ Trapped on the island, Ben had this scene under his eyelids as he sat by the hearth, driftwood shooting green sparks up the chimney. Her irises had been green like a mossy lake shore. _

Rubbing at her eyes furiously, she stumbled to Ren’s side. Wordlessly, he turned the flashlight on, and they stepped through the crack and into the darkness.


	7. Too much

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a bit early, hope you don't mind. ;) Thank you, fulcrum_of_pemberley!

_ “’Oh, crap, you’re not gonna believe me, are you? Think it’s a trap or something— No, no, no, don’t cut the transmission, mayday, mayday! Look, my name’s twenty— Name’s Finn. I’m trying to help Poe Dameron and to do that I really, really need to pass a word to General Organa.’” _

\- A radio transmission.

~*~

They’d been walking for hours, taking the right passage every time the tunnel forked (it did so a lot; they had to go back twice because passages either became too narrow or ended in a blockage), when Rey found her voice for the first time since the last speck of the sun had disappeared behind their backs.

“The map, you circled something on it.” Not a question. It was a bit late for that.

“As I told you, our position... give or take a few miles. Before my mission, I went through every map of the area the Order had. According to them, there are several springheads south-east from where we’ve entered.”

“I didn’t know Jakku’d been mapped in our era! We’re  _ the _ dump nobody cares about. Has your Order done it or…?” She couldn’t see Ren’s face but his back, silhouetted sharply against the flashlight’s beam, tensed at her words.

“No, the First Order didn’t have that kind of… interest in Jakku either.”

“So, we’re talking pre-Blackout scans.”

The beam faltered as Ren adjusted his grip in the flashlight. He said nothing. Rey gritted her teeth.  _ I’m not going to like it…. _

“And you can tell where the south-east is, can’t you?”

After a dozen of silent steps through the tunnel’s cool, dry stillness, Rey poked him between the shoulder blades.

“Ren, do you know where we’re going or not?”

“Yes, I  _ do _ know.”

   “How?”

“…Intuition.”

“Intu— What?!” She rounded him, her backpack catching at the wall. And the walls — they got so much closer all of a sudden. Colder, too, now bereft even of familiar yellow-browns of sandstone and russet streaks of clay. The flashlight was hueing dull limestone surrounding them in ghostly blue and made Ren’s features — odd as they were — uncannily angular.

“I mean it.” Ren tilted his head down and his face became normal again, illuminated more evenly. His eyes were serious, and very dark, and the look in them had somehow soothed the panic climbing up the ladder of Rey’s ribs. Ren sighed.

“It… comes with foreseeing. Sense of direction. Instinctively choosing the path you need.”

Rey crossed her arms over her chest.

“I remember you saying you’re not good at foreseeing.”

“Obviously, I’m not good at foreseeing when to shut up,” Ren deadpanned, almost — almost! — startling a nervous laugh out of her. “Rey, I— I  _ know _ how it sounds. But right now this ability is the only thing that makes chances of our survival worthy of mentioning. I have to trust it. You’re right to feel… skeptical—”

“To put it mildly….”

“—but  _ you _ don’t have to blindly trust in  _ my _ abilities.”

Rey blinked. “As in,  _ I _ should attempt to foresee the future now?”

Ren nudged her forward. When they walked side by side their shoulders were no further from the tunnel’s pale stone than a palm’s width.

“Not the future. Basic things, like knowing where to go.”

“Why would you even think I have it in me?” Rey scoffed.

“Your homeland is famous for killing people who stray from its roads, and you don’t live anywhere near one — otherwise I would’ve felt you sooner while passing through Jakku. So, you tell me.”

“I’ve lived here for a long time, that’s all. And Jakku’s not my homeland.”

Ren gave her a side-glance.

“Whatever you say.”

The silence that followed tasted of things left unspoken. Rey fell back not ten minutes later to stare at the collar of Ren’s jacket and not his profile. Without his prominent nose, or heavy brow, or moles, though, there was nothing to distract her from his words.

She didn’t like the idea of attributing her capability to some magic, or cosmic, or whatever power. The telepathic stuff she couldn’t deny without lying to herself now that it was… awake. And before that — she could tell when people around her were up to no good; when a trader was about to cheat her in the marketplace; when another scavenger was considering chasing her through a remote waste-ground. But this  _ foreseeing _ bullshit? No, it had nothing to do with Rey knowing her way around Jakku. She was focused, and kept her eyes open, and didn’t wander into the sands high on the nuclear fungus. Or drunk.

Ren couldn’t be right. If he was, then— Years ago, she took care to drag her trailer away from the roads. Yesterday, she let Finn go — and didn’t guide him to one. Did she send him to his death in more ways than one? A drop of sweat slid down Rey’s face, leaving a cold trace on her clammy skin and stinging her too dry lips.

Lost in thought, Rey didn’t notice Ren stopping and bumped into him, breath leaving her with an “oof!” Something peculiar happened, then. Ren’s presence became… less. She was looking right at him, yet he appeared distant and Rey didn’t feel anything from him as if he turned into a man-shaped stalagmite. Rey wasn’t even fully aware that she felt things until there were none.

It had happened before, she realized, in the first cave, after she told him off for snooping through her head. Back then she was too angry to put a finger on the change, but here, now…. It was unnerving, how dim his whole being had become. Did he withdraw into himself to contain his annoyance? Was he pissed because she didn’t look where she was going?

They stood at yet another fork, a deceptively thin slice of limestone dividing the tunnel in two. Ren lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

Oh, gods and spirits damn him, he was messing with her!

Rey shrugged and pointed at the right passage. With a thoughtful hum, Ren handed her the flashlight. They walked until muscles in Rey’s calves and thighs cramped, stopped to share a can of stewed vegetables (those tasted like the green summer she’s only ever read about), and walked some more. Then, the flashlight unsteady in Rey’s aching hand, its beam bounced off the dead end. There was no blockage this time, just the tunnel’s walls, and floor, and rounded roof coming together seamlessly. A blind gut.

A wordless shout erupted from Rey’s lips, ringing in the still air. The tunnel threw it back at her with an echo as she leaped forward and started kicking the stone, pain reverberating in her spine. She wished for her bat to hit, hit, hit until it was slivered and her palms were bloody.

_ Fucking. Useless. _ Should’ve put more thought into her choice or refused to choose the direction all together. What had she done, recently, that didn’t result in a catastrophe?

“Stop.” Ren’s hand settled at her nape while he pried the blinking flashlight from her with the other. “It’s not your fault. I would’ve chosen the right tunnel, too.”

Rey wiggled out of his grip — he let her, she suspected — and whirled back to him, opening her mouth to— No sound came out. Her voice betrayed her again. Her eyes were burning. Ren was pointing the flashlight down; their feet in the circle of bluish light got blurry. Rey couldn’t stand this light.

“We’ll rest here,” Ren was saying, “and then try another passage.”

Rey dropped her backpack.

“You read me again,” she accused him half-heartedly as they sat beside the syntcoil disk a bit later. Ren yawned. It was contagious.

“I wasn’t prying, it’s just…. I can’t help but take in the things you’re… going through without making a conscious effort not to.” Another yawn. In the syntcoil’s soft glow, he looked as exhausted as Rey felt.

“Is it always like that for you?”  _ Will it always be like that for me if I get to live and see other people again? _

“No, usually it’s far from effortless. I’m not sure what’s so different about you.” Ren’s head lolled back against the wall, throat vulnerable. Rey believed him: in that fleeting moment, she sensed every sinew of his under her skin. It was unlike anything else. It passed too soon.

Rey was up long after Ren had fallen asleep. Cold made her restless. This deep into the mountain’s body, with the tunnel’s walls so close around them, the syntcoil alone couldn’t hold the cold at bay. It was bearable while they walked, but the chill started to cut through cloth and tissue when the movement ceased.  

Her island was eluding her, so Rey wrapped the pebble’s smooth surface around herself. Letting the unfriendly shadows batter against her shell, she wondered if Ren was doing something similar when he dimmed his presence.

He was, it turned out. Or, at least, Rey’s childhood trick had the same effect as his method: after a few minutes Ren’s face crumpled and he jerked awake, her name on his parched lips, arm outstretched towards where Rey was shivering under her blanket. He looked—  _ was _ — unhinged  until he recognized her form in the half-light.

“You figured how to keep me out,” he rasped. A heart was pounding. Ren dropped his forehead on his fists, turning on his stomach. “I thought you’d left.”

_ Please don’t leave me. _

“I wouldn’t,” Rey said, shy for some reason. And then she told him about the pebble. In as little words as possible for the story to still make sense (it was so dear to her, and dear things were to be shared only with darling people), she told him.

Because, if it wasn’t for him, she’d die alone.

At last, the exhaustion overcame her and Rey fell into a kind of a stupor, aware of her surroundings but too tired to as much as lift her eyelids.

“When I tied it to  _ your _ bag, I meant for  _ you _ to use it,” Ren grumbled at her side before covering her with something pleasantly heavy and smelling like him.

Rey thought it was his jacket, but, no, it was enveloping her whole body. The unfastened sleeping bag.  _ Right. He had… a sleeping bag…. _

*

They took the last sips from the canteen before entering the left tunnel. As Ren passed the canteen to Rey, she gave him a tiny sad smile. It was the brightest thing he’d seen in days. They’d been walking for an hour and a half when the tunnel had started to go up. Vader’s watch showed quarter past three but Ren honestly couldn’t tell if it was after midnight or noon. The walls were curved, more so than in the passages they’d left behind; whether the direction was in their favor or not, Ren preferred not to ponder.

Ache in his head bloomed in synch with his footsteps and his vision swam if he moved too fast — dehydration was already taking its toll. Plus, however mild his concussion might have been originally, his current…  _ daily regime _ wasn’t helping Ren recover from it by the slightest. Rey was faring somewhat better, although earlier this—  _ day? night? _ he sensed painful thickness in her throat which she did her best to ignore. He considered asking her if she was hoping it’d simply go away, but before he could open his mouth and upset their fragile balance, Rey pulled at his sleeve and, in turn, asked for the med kit. She forced down a horse dose of antibiotics without complaint, mixing it with the gooey canned vegetables.

This passage — same as the damned right one — was too bloody long. It grated on his nerves; more than once Ren caught himself clenching and unclenching his empty fist, waiting for the flashlight beam to reveal another dead end and— Then what? They’d retrace their steps to the narrower tunnels they didn’t try — the mental map of their progress was still fresh in Ren’s memory, and he’d been cutting notches in the limestone. But with no water left in the canteen they could easily fit all their remaining time in there.

Without preamble, the flashlight blinked and died.

The darkness that followed was absolute, no adjustment to it. They stopped abruptly, a spark of panic shooting from Rey to him. Hastily, Ren withdrew from the telepathic field and shielded his mind from Rey: panic fed of panic. His powers had been surprisingly stable for the last couple of days but there was no telling what would happen if he lost control over his emotions. Rey could get hurt or—

“No!” Rey exclaimed. “No, where did you go?!”

“Here, I’m here.” He found her shoulders and patted them awkwardly. Her searching fingers grazed his scratchy jaw.

“I— Please, can you open yourself?” Rey’s voice was very small. The biggest thing in this whole mountain range.

“I will,” he assured her, “but first… breathe. You’re afraid, and I feel it, too. Fear and I don’t work well together.”

“…Makes sense.”

Listening to her deepening breaths, Ren fumbled at his belt, unclasping the helmet from the tanned leather and hanging the traitorous flashlight in its place by a metal ring.

“Okay, I’m calmer now,” Rey said as he slipped the helmet on. The night visor was functioning, thank every deity still alive. His eyes settled on Rey’s green-hued figure — the doe ready to flee — and he couldn’t… not.   

“Boo!” he breathed out, leaning closer to her, the helmet’s speaker turning the sound into a growl of a monster from the bowels of the earth.

Rey jumped, letting out a strangled yelp. Then, “You arse!”

He laughed, bubbling and doubling over with mirth long forgotten. He was wheezing, hands on his knees, tears running down his nose and onto the visor’s glass. He hadn’t laughed like that since—

“Ren?” Rey called. “Are you all right?”  _ Ah. _ This sudden near-hysterical glee must’ve seemed…  _ pathetic _ .

But as he reached for Rey in the telepathic field, he was met with a heady mix of concern and tentative amusement. It was intoxicating.

“I am. Sorry.”

“What in the world was that?”

“Just trying to brighten the mood. The situation was starting to stress me out.”

She truly  _ was _ amused, now.

“You’re afraid of dark places?”

“Not a fan. Well, uh….” He touched her elbow with his fingertips, fighting the urge to wipe both of his palms at his pants. “I can see in the helmet. Let’s…?”

Wordlessly, Rey took his hand, and— Subtler than the twenty-fifth frame in propaganda videos for stormtroopers, there was green grass leaning softly to the ground. Fresh wind. A sea bird’s cry.

Ren blinked. Shit, his head wasn’t doing well. Except, somehow, Rey was looking right at him through the blackness of the mountain’s bowels. She looked in his covered face. Maybe even his uncovered soul. The night visor was making the whites of her eyes uncannily bright.

Shaking himself out of it, Ren glanced at their joined hands. Compared to Rey’s, his was a giant paw — a monster, indeed.

Ren pulled her after him.


	8. Moon-kissed cheeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: severe dehydration, confined spaces.  
> TW: there's a very vague mention of a character considering a possibility of suicide. If you're uncomfortable with it, skip from "What would you do?" to "One thing was clear <...>" and head to the end notes to see what's up.
> 
> [fulcrum_of_pemberley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fulcrum_of_pemberley), thank you for your help!

_ “I received the order to turn around when the convoy was halfway back to the base. <…> We’d found the cave Ren’s phone had been tracked to before it got destroyed and were ready to start digging through the rockslide when the TIEs went silent again. <…> I had my orders: either to confirm Ren was dead or to kill him. The latter was surprising, I admit, but it wasn’t my place to question Leader Snoke’s decisions.” _

\- An excerpt from the fourth interrogation of N. N. Phasma, former commanding officer of the First Order. Year 76 PBE.

 

~*~

Time didn’t exist anymore. They stopped checking Ren’s watch after a while: the further they walked, the more looking at the clock hands felt like counting hours that  _ remained _ . Moisture from the canned food helped —  but barely. Soon Rey couldn’t make herself swallow any of it because of the metallic tang of blood that seeped into her mouth from her lips. The skin there had become so dry and tender. It hurt.

The left tunnel had started branching like a tree and every branch so far had turned out treacherous, either blocked or blind, forcing them to go back again, and again, and again. Deep down, under the feverish haze, Rey knew that they couldn’t’ve been crawling up this dark tree’s withering trunk for more than two days but—  Time didn’t exist.

Ren was the first to black out, sagging to the ground and yanking Rey down by her hand still cradled in his. The helmet met stone with a thud; Rey landed on Ren’s back, the sword’s hilt nearly poking her eye out and splitting her cheekbone. The sharp, new pain of it jolted her out of the stupor she’d fallen into.

Pulling the helmet off Ren’s head took some fumbling —  its latches were slipping from her fingers in the dark.

She put the helmet on. Through the night visor, Ren looked like a ghost.

He wouldn’t wake up, his skin hot and clammy, eyes moving frantically under his crusted eyelids. It was just like before, but this time there was nothing Rey could do for him. No water in the med kit. No water in their bags.

She had another hallucination as she half slapped, half caressed his cheeks —  Rey saw Ren’s face, still, but instead of the cave floor there was a pillow under his head, the light pillowcase in stark contrast with his longer hair. To Rey’s thirst-inflamed brain, this one seemed no stranger than the fleeting image of unfamiliar grasses.

What was there left to do? Chances were, soon she’d collapse, too. But what if she would stay lucid for too long? The thought of having to sit by Ren’s side and wait and then feel their spider web-thin connection dissipate —  for good, for real — terrified her. The pebble kept cracking around her, leaving her mind wide open to Ren’s inevitable… death.

Rey shrugged the backpack off, stood up, and trudged away, swaying like a drunk. They had almost made it to a new embranchment when Ren lost consciousness, and now Rey hesitated before it, three equally menacing limestone pharynges calling for her. If she crawled into any one of them, maybe the distance would spare her, making it so that Rey couldn’t tell whether Ren had already blinked out of existence. Chest heaving with dry sobs, she got into the central passage, the only one that didn’t make her think of the mountain swallowing her whole.

Its roof wasn’t tall enough for Rey to stand upright. She inched forward, first hunched down, holding on to walls with bent arms, then on all fours, then on her stomach.

“Don’t wake up,” she whispered, her tongue too big and sticky with bile, “please, don’t wake up when I’m not there.”

Her elbow slipped and Rey’s head fell to the ground under the helmet’s weight. She lay there, with two frantic heartbeats trapped in her ribcage, for a few long minutes before it sank in.

Her elbow had slipped.

Her elbow had slipped!

Rey clawed at the latches, and lifted the helmet over her mouth and nose, and drew in a lungful of the wet chalk’s smell. She pushed herself further, then, every muscle at work —  and more. With a sudden loss of balance, Rey slid down what felt like a couple feet, landing on the floor of a roundish cavity. She hit her chin, teeth clanking. Blood trickled between her lips and into the ice-cold, liquid mud.

There was a puddle. Rey was drinking from it, whimpering, until the pricking pain in her belly made her stop. After, she was so close to just… passing out but the cold was keeping her alert, and as her head cleared a bit—

_ Ren! _

Hastily, Rey tore the upper shirt from her shoulders —  she was still wearing a grand total of three — and dipped it into the water. Then she wormed, and crawled, and ran back, cradling the shirt to her chest. She wrung it out over Ren’s mouth, and he moaned, blindly reaching for the cloth with his lips.

“I’ll—  I’ll get us more!” Rey hiccupped and started up again, leaving Ren to suck on her shirt.

She lumbered to the central passage, slowing down for fear of throwing up in the helmet and short circuiting it or passing out after all. Sheer adrenalin must’ve kept Rey on her feet, for she was shaking violently, her vision spotty. When she returned to Ren with the full canteen, she almost broke his nose with it,  _ willing _ the misted aluminum to stay glued to her fingertips at the last second.

Ren finally whispered something —  the tiniest sound — when Rey lifted the canteen from his greedy mouth for the third or fourth time. In between tending to Ren, she had also watered down the febrifuge for both of them and lit the syntcoil. She was feeling better already, though bone-tired.

“Hi….” A few days’ worth of stubble tickled Rey’s palm pleasantly as she cupped Ren’s cheek.

He smiled at her, dark irises glinting under eyelashes.

“I could kiss you….”

“I’d fall asleep on the way down to you.” She was smiling, too. “Roll on your side, okay?”

He did, rolling right onto the open sleeping bag Rey had at the ready. She lay next to him, zipped the sleeping bag around them, and fell under before her temple touched its warm material.

*

Water seeped through the earthy floor of a bubble-like cavity and then down a narrow slope which ended somewhere far beyond the helmet’s vision range.

“You think it’s deep?” Rey asked when Ren described to her what little he could see.

“I’m thinking whether or not I’ll get stuck in there.” Getting into the cavity had been a challenge all in itself.

“I can go first— ”

“No. You— You’ve already ventured in here, alone. It’s my turn to take risks. Besides, if there are more springheads or if this one forms a well…. Rey, you can’t swim, can you?”

“Yeah, you’re right, I can’t.”

She was surprisingly docile. Guarded, too, ever since she’d gotten enough rest to think beyond water and warmth. It’s not like Ren didn’t have his shields half-raised after waking up curled around her with his  _ other _ assets half-raised (in his defense, it’d been awhile). Still. He wondered what was on her mind.

“Wish me luck!” Ren had tried to keep his descent somewhat dignified but ended up sliding down on his ass thanks to a layer of wet fine sand covering the slope. It wasn’t too deep, the tube-like slope opening into a new, relatively spacious tunnel with a ribbon of a brook running through it. “It’s okay!” he shouted and caught first their bags and then Rey, holding her by the hips, briefly. She tensed at his touch, hurrying to feel around for her backpack.

_ Ah, well _ . If, for a handful of hours, she’d forgotten who he was, now she clearly remembered. He didn’t want to remember himself at times, so this didn’t come as a surprise, yet….

“Ren, there’s a draft!” Rey’s exclamation shook him out of his bitter musings.

“What?” He lifted the helmet from his face and—  Yes, the air wasn’t as still as before, moving ever so slightly against his flushed skin.

“There might— ” Rey started, “There might be a way out.”

“Let’s not set our hopes too high,” Ren said, even though his own heart had pulled a dangerous rhythmic stunt at the thought.

He knew that darkness had thinned when Rey let go of his hand.

They didn’t find what they both longed for, but, after days that were sure to give Ren nightmares of a monotone, claustrophobic kind, moonlight felt like a gift. The tunnel led them to a cave about the size of a plane hangar at the First Order base —  not that large, in all honesty; too many military planes would’ve inevitably driven the Republic’s attention to their other aircrafts— but Ren’s mind was reeling. The  _ space _ was absolutely overwhelming.

And there was moonlight, streaming from a cleft in the cave’s roof and into a natural pool in the middle of it. The brook filled the pool and emerged from it as a talkative stream rather than a hair ribbon before disappearing in the shadows by the cave’s far wall. Was it feeding of the light?

Looking up, mesmerized, Ren dropped his helmet on the ground. The white-yellow moon was drifting so impossibly high.

“I’ve never seen a cheese-like moon,” he stated smartly. All this hope was doing funny things to his thought process.

“I’ve never seen such cheese,” Rey said from behind him, sounding equally dumbfounded.

On second thought, it was probably time to open another can of porridge.

Ren made the mistake of looking at Rey, then, at her loose hair, dark in the silvery lighting, at her moon-kissed cheeks and wide-blown pupils.

He wished he wasn’t Ren of the First Order.

*

There wasn’t much to look at until the sun rose, so once they set up camp and ate and there was nothing more to distract her, Rey’s hackles started to rise again. What she had done right before falling face-first into that puddle, since she had regained the energy to truly process it, had had her wanting to leap out of her skin and paddle the fuck away. 

Coward.

“Can’t you haul yourself up there? Telekinetically?” Rey asked to break the infuriatingly compassionate silence Ren was emanating.

The stratum of rocks framed familiar stars.

“Through, what, forty feet of thin air plus the chasm?” He appeared to seriously consider it, lying on bare ground with his hands under his head. “No, it’d be like carrying my own weight for forty feet. I’m shredded, just so you know, but not that shredded. Then again, it won’t be my weight alone, and lifting both of us would likely give me a stroke. Overuse of abilities is a b—  Rey?”

Rey shot to her feet, turning her back to him and pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes, scrunched shut.

“Hey.” Ren’s fingertips grazed her shoulder almost timidly. “Don’t cry. We’ll find a way o— ”    

“I left!” she shouted into the cave’s cotton darkness and whirled around, cheeks burning. “After you passed out, I wasn’t looking for water! You—  You were breathing so— The fever, I felt it but couldn’t block— I ran off because I got scared I’d feel you die.” Rey didn’t intend to cry — not out of pity for herself and certainly not to soften Ren —  but here she was, drenching her sleeves with tears and snot.

Ren didn’t move for a long moment,  _ the damn stalagmite _ , and then he sort off… tripped her up by hooking his giant foot behind her ankles and putting his arm around her waist. Next thing Rey knew, they were sitting on her ratty blanket not touching once again.

“Sorry, my knees are killing me.”

“Your knees.”

“Uh-huh.”

Rey sniffed, bewildered.

“That’s all you’re going to say? Ren,  _ I left you for dead _ .”

“You chose the lesser evil, and it led you to water. I’m not about to complain.”

“Yeah, but what if I didn’t find anything?”

“Then neither of us would be here to ask the question.”

“What would you do?” Rey asked, searching his face, her own itchy with drying tears.

“I don’t know.” That wasn’t a lie, she knew, read —  whatever. Wasn’t the truth either — the fleeting glance Ren gave to his sword, its opaque sheath absorbing the glow of the syntcoil and moonlight alike, was telling.

_ “Why the sword?” She’d asked back in the tunnels, before the flashlight had stopped working. “It’s so much slower than a gun…. Or are you bulletproof? I presumed you were wearing some high-tech, from-outer-space soft armor, but these are just unnecessarily tight leather pants.”   _

_ He snorted. _

_ “These are quite comfy, actually. And no, not bulletproof. I jam a gun’s trigger from a distance —  gives me enough time to get closer.” _

_ “But why? Isn’t close combat more, uh, personal?” _

_ “It is.” _

_ Rey spent the following half an hour weighting her chances should the maniac decide to get personal with her. They didn’t look good. _

_ “The Order trains ‘troopers so that they don’t see those on the other side of the barrel as people.” Ren said after a while. “Our general believes it makes them more loyal —  maybe he’s right, I got to give him this one. The idea of your kills  _ not counting _ is… tempting. But killing always counts and it’s significantly harder to brush death off when it reverberates through your arms. And if the body count becomes too atrocious, a pierced through heart is better than a blown off skull — and many other deaths. Hence the sword.” _

_ She felt a bit calmer after that terrible, terrible little speech. _

Ren shook his head fiercely, hair falling forward over his brow obscuring his expression. He fisted his fists in the blanket as if to prevent his hands moving by their own accord. He shrugged, hearing Rey’s broken inhale or feeling her heart break. “I’m not good at dealing with high stress. Too unstable.”

_ A pierced through heart is better than many other deaths. _

Such a grim confession to make, albeit mutely, it simultaneously split and mended something inside Rey, her chest heavy with an emotion she didn’t have a name for. Had no idea what to do with.

One thing was clear, though: she wasn’t going to leave Ren to blindly stare at the syntcoil after what he  _ hadn’t _ said. Rey shifted so that she was kneeling next to him, inclining her head to peek through his matted locks. Stray hairs moved with her breath.

“Ren, do you mean to say… that up ‘til now stress  _ wasn’t _ high?”

“It was but….” He unfroze, rolling his stiff shoulders. A vertebrae in his neck gave out an audible crunch. “You were there. I had to keep it together to impress you.”

Despite the joking, he was shaken; Rey saw it even without tapping into his emotions. Being this close face to face with him —  the closest they’ve been yet — she could distinguish a tick under his left eye, previously concealed by the flickering lighting.

_ What’s with the “yet?” _

Still, Rey huffed out a breathy laugh.

“Impress me what for?”

Ren moved his lips in a way that made him look sheepish. His hands relaxed, palms flat on the blanket; Rey’s palms were suddenly sweating, filled with her heartbeat up to the fingertips.

“For you to consider… learning from me.” He was speaking quicker now. “Telepathy, foreseeing, even telekinesis. You’re untrained but better than you know, and I—  I won’t be the best teacher, for my control over the abilities tends to waver, but I can’t  _ not _ ask you.”

As he spoke, Ren was so intensely earnest. Had they not spent days saving each other’s lives hand in hand, Rey’d be taken aback by the passion behind his words. The Rey after the tunnels nodded gingerly.

“All right.”

“You mean it?” He swallowed, gaze jumping from her eyes to her forehead to her mouth.

“Yes. While our paths align… it can’t hurt.”

He grinned, then, all dimples. His canines stood out among his slightly crooked teeth; his face muscles seemed to refuse to cooperate fully like—  like he hadn’t smiled in a very long time. Ren looked like a completely different person. Like someone who might’ve had the memories Rey sank into a hundred years ago in the Tuanul post office.

She liked his smile very much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I think about it, the blunt explanation is probably much harsher than the actual text, so be warned lol!   
> Rey asks what would Ren do if she was the one to pass out first and he remained lucid during/after her death; he doesn't say it directly but he looks at his sword, and there's a flashback of them talking about why Ren fights with a sword and not a gun; among other reasons, he mentions that, if he'd done too much evil to live with himself, he would prefer to fall on his sword rather than to shoot himself (because reasons).


	9. You and I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are an author - go say something nice to your beta.  
> In this chapter, fulcrum_of_pemberley saved Ren from keeping a knife in his back instead of his bag (my typos can be funnier than my actual humor lol). 
> 
> CW: animal death.

_ “He was disgustingly stubborn, even in the state he was in when he’d come to me. Acquiring such a tool, however, was worth the trouble. All that power…. <…> _

_ Consistently bending his will takes its toll on me, but the longer I do it, the easier it becomes. The way this stupid boy longs for the incantation —the very thing that sets off the psychokinetic outbursts should he stumble upon a trigger —never ceases to amuse me. <…> _

_ In a few years, he might not remember his own name; he doesn’t need to remember anything but the Order.” _

\- A few deciphered fragments from S. L. Snoke’s personal journal. Data restored by the 3rd tech division of the Army of Resistance.

~*~

As the dawn filled the cave with patina-colored glares, it became clear that Ren and she had just emerged from a limestone hell, both gray-haired from the chalk and overall smeared with it.

Oblique sun rays were warming the air by the minute.

Droplets of water from the sweetest mountain spring glistened on Ren’s magnificent pectorals and dripped down his magnificenter abs before catching in the delicious line of black hairs running down his rock-hard stomach to disappear in the waistband of his  _ unnecessarily tight _ pants. Ren hadn’t been stretching the truth by saying he was shredded — without his jacket and shirt the man looked like a romance novel cover. Rey wasn’t touching such books ever again. The only trouble she’d expected, downloading them on her reader from the Tuanul point of the internet access, was malware often clinging to spicier files. She  _ did not _ expect her brain to be flooded with two-edged epithets for male physique the second Ren bared his upper body to wash away the grime.

Ren had stuff in his bag that Rey hadn’t given much thought to prior because it was useless — if not outright annoying — without a water source. He had a washcloth, a bar of woody-smelling soap (at least, she thought that’s what real wood would smell like), a razor, and a small fancy jar of deodorant, all of which he didn’t hesitate to use. He also had a back — as if sleeping back to back with him wasn’t enough for Rey to figure it out — with moles, and muscles moving under the pale skin, and paler roundish scars the size of her fingertip, dotting his flesh along the spine. It was… quite a view, so Rey stared pointedly at the cave’s roof, sitting on a flat rock.

“Can I borrow your blanket?” Ren called from his spot by the further end of the pool.

“Uh, sure?” Mildly confused, Rey watched the item in question float past her to unfold before Ren and hang in the air, leaving only his feet visible.  _ Oh. Oh, no. _

There went the pants.

It helped that, in the daylight, their new chamber truly was a place to absorb. Rey had never seen anything quite like it. Here limestone ceded its grounds to some other kind of rock, rusty brown and sparkling slightly, its ledges forming giant upside-down steps descending from the cleft in the roof in all directions. A mountain god’s stairs. Sizeable stalactites adorned the cleft’s edges — Ren and she stayed clear of those — and stalagmites mirrored them, popping up here and there around the pool, reminding Rey of a lower jaw of some ancient beast. And, dusting every stone that the warmth touched, there was  _ green _ .

Rey had only known moss to grow in patches no bigger than her palm, clinging to rare shaded surfaces. Here it was bolder, and thicker, and softer, and greener even than her dreams. At the first light, when Rey was gasping and running her fingers through it, Ren said that she should see the Naboo Plain, said that it was way greener. She didn’t believe him.

Ren plopped down on the mossy carpet beside her, wet hair ever curlier. Rey eyed his fresh gray shirt with envy.

“I feel like a person again,” he sighed happily. “The soap’s all yours, by the way.”

“I will be nothing but a gentleman, unlike  _ some _ .” Ren added, noticing how unsure Rey looked. Shit. She could swear she had locked her shameless ogling away. “But holding up the blanket would be good practice.”

“How do you even know I have telekinesis in the first place?” Rey crossed her arms over her chest. “I’ve bodily moved heavy pieces of junk since I was five —think I’d notice it if a magic power was assisting me.”

_ The passage is too narrow. The smell of wet chalk. Her limbs barely moving. _

“It can be dormant or passive,” he nodded, absentmindedly grazing the moss with his wide palms, “but it’s telepathy’s twin ability. If you get a grip on one, the other’s not far behind. And telekinesis is easier.”

“Are you kidding?” Rey was staring at him, suspicious.

“Not at all. It uses your whole body as an energy source, while telepathy only takes from your brain, which is more dangerous. Drains you faster, will wreck blood vessels in your head if you aren’t careful. My—Leader Snoke, the man who’s been training me for the past ten years, only took me as an apprentice because his own telepathic abilities were giving him seizures, and the Order couldn’t grow as fast as it needed to without mind reading and persuasion.”

Hearing the name, Rey winced, the syllables immediately bringing up the memory of the hateful voice gnawing at Ren’s mind. _Hell_ _of_ _a_ _teacher,_ _this_ _Snoke_. She ought to have asked Ren about him… but the word “seizures” had snatched her attention.

Rey gestured between them, her eyebrows drawn.

“It’s been, what, three, four days since our minds have…?”  _ So little time, _ it struck her,  _ we’ve known each other for less than a week _ . “How long is too long? I don’t feel any strain but—”

“No, no, this….” Ren sat up, turning fully to her. “What connects you and I, is different. Passive, almost like breathing —or, at least, that’s how it is for me.” He searched her face, pensive.

Rey hummed affirmatively, and Ren’s expression changed from concerned to relieved without really changing at all.

“I’ve never formed such a bond with anyone, but I don’t think it can cause us any harm.”

A bond. The way he said it made something warm stir inside Rey. She regretted her next question the moment it left her mouth.

“Could your teacher know how it works?”

“He might,” Ren mused. “Leader Snoke’s own training goes back to Palpatine’s court. He dedicated his youth to preserving knowledge rebels of the time had set out to bury.” He paused before muttering, “He won’t be pleased with me.”

_ Because you saved me? What else have you done?  _ Rey meant to ask, but Ren sent the blanket flying her way. It covered her head.

“Back to the matter at hand. Try concentrating on the telepathic field —it may help with coaxing your telekinetic streak out.”

Rey huffed. Skeptical, she marched to the bathing side of the pool where the stream carried dirty water away, the blanket around her shoulders like an oversized towel.

*

Two cans of beans and a handful of crackers was all the food they had left. Under normal circumstances the rations Ren had had packed in his saddle bags would’ve lasted him three days —he’d have even less, had he not been too pissed off to eat before  _ Rey _ happened —and they had already stretched them beyond reason. Running on a few bites a day, now that thirst wasn’t eclipsing every other physical need, was making Ren want to tear off a chunk of his own thigh with his teeth.

Rey seemed neither frustrated nor content: eating half a pound per roughly twenty-four hours wasn’t new to her. Which, in turn, was making Ren want to maybe take a bite from whomever held the leash of Jakku’s meager economy.

His bag not weighing on him like an extra leg was nice. The prospect of boiling and eating said bag later (and his boots, and his belt) was not. It wasn’t even real leather.

As Rey splashed, coughed, and muttered curses behind him, Ren was squinting at the cleft’s torn walls. A tangle of twigs showing over the edge of a stone protrusion could be a bird’s nest… or it could be a bush. But there was a winged silhouette high in the sky, black against the heating blue. Ren tugged at the tangle with his mind, the magnetic power hot in the depth of his pupils narrowed to needle’s eyes. The object gave, and shifted, and rained down dry leaves. A nest it was, with five pinkish eggs, he discovered as he lowered his loot to the ground. And as the bird cry echoed off the cleft’s walls, Ren didn’t have to make a conscious choice —before his focus faltered, he sent a shard of stone up with a snap of his wrist.

A deformed feathered creature the size of a large vulture fell on the moss, stunned. A mutant, still bird-like, its red-tipped wing feathers as majestic as those of previous generations. Its head, however, was flattened unnaturally, and it had toothless, yet visibly sharp exoskeletal jaws in place of the beak. It could easily snap human neck vertebrae. Ren beheaded the creature with his sword before it came to from the hit.

“Now, that was… terrifyingly efficient,” Rey said, approaching him, stepping softly with her bare feet. She had tied her hair up in a tight knot, the way it had been before the tunnels, so that it didn’t drip on her clothes. The line of her neck, rubbed clean and pink, was—

“I’ll teach you.” He wiped the blade clean with a piece of moss, shaking a tiny emerald bug from his thumb.

And that was what Ren put his energy into in the following hour —teaching Rey to pluck feathers out without lifting a finger. She was doing well. The task took his mind off the filigreed shadows cast upon Rey’s skin by short curls at the nape of her neck —for a time. Embarrassingly soon his eyes drifted back to her, and he had to busy himself with frying the eggs on the syntcoil. She had freckles. She was only wearing one layer.

Done with the feathers, Rey retrieved Ren’s knife from his bag and crouched beside the carcass.

“You say you lack control….”

_ You’ve no idea. _ Ren cleared his throat.

“But so far you’ve been nothing but. In control, I mean. After what Finn had told me about you, I thought you were going to charge at rocks that are in your way or something.”

_ Finn? _ He searched his memory of her memories.  _ Ah. The 2187th took his birth name back. _

“I’m not pointing fingers, but my thunder was stolen.”

Rey flushed; the sight would’ve been disarming if she wasn’t also wrist-deep in the creature’s guts.

“It’s not just my temper. It’s about me being able to control my abilities.” Ren turned a frying egg with the fork. “You didn’t have to see it, luckily, but away from Leader Snoke’s guidance I can be like… an earthquake. They happen in Jakku, right?”

She nodded.

“Small ones, echoes from the ocean.”

“Well, that’s what the lack of control looks like. Everything rattles. I suspect it also gives those around me nightmares, but I don’t usually sleep anywhere near others, so I can’t be certain.”

“I’ve had weird dreams,” Rey admitted as they were putting streaks of dark-red sinewy meat to dry in the sun -the few bits that they put on the syntcoil had burned instead of cooking properly- “but never nightmares.”

“As I said, we’ve been lucky.”

“Honestly, how bad can it be?”

Ren didn’t want to answer, instead making a show of cutting his two and a half fried eggs into increasingly smaller pieces. But he needed to, didn’t he?

“I killed a man once.” He braced for the red roar of rage that rattled through his head if he remembered so much as his father’s name. It never came. There was nothing but the dull pain and yearning. “It would be… easier to show you. I’d rather not, but if I  _ am _ to teach you, I must.”

Ren extended his hand to her, palm up.

“Please.”

A look of uncertainty crossed her face upon realizing what he meant, yet Rey extended her hand towards his.

As their fingertips touched, the cave, the moss, and the blazing sun disappeared, black waters closing over their heads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I deeply appreciate every hit this story gets. <3  
> *whispers and winks* But comments make my gardens bloom.


	10. Wood chips

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fulcrum_of_pemberley helped make this chapter 1000% better. Thank you! <3 
> 
> And thank /you/ if you're reading my story. I appreciate every hit.
> 
> CW: torture; feels.

_“The awful truth is, not only had I served the Order since the operation was in the early stages of planning, I had been contributing my spies and my gifts for the plan to work. Weak spots in the Republic’s defense, their tech, their maps…. Without my intel, the bombing wouldn't have been possible, and that fact was filling me with such shame that saying_ anything at all to Rey _seemed… damning. Thinking back to it — what a_ damning _projection it was.”_

\- A fragment from a therapeutic letter. Year 78 PBE.   

~*~

Rey’s breath hitched. The prospect of repeating the experience from the Tuanul post office stood in her throat like a lump of porridge did when there was no water left in the canteen. Yet…. The words “lesser evil,” said so dismissively about dying alone, in the dark, still sat in the corner of her consciousness.

Ren’s left eye began twitching as soon as he mentioned Snoke, and she couldn’t pretend she didn’t notice.

He was right; Rey needed to know something tangible about Ren before her conflicted feelings towards him — growing from glimpses and disjointed pieces — became overripe and started to fester. Or mutated into the one feeling she wasn’t ready to consider. The dangerous one.

Rey took Ren’s hand.

This time was… smoother. She was willing — and invited — and Ren’s touch guided her to a lungful of the same woody smell Ren’s soap had. Rey, some ephemeral part of her, was in the woods. Young trees with sticky light-green leaves surrounded her for as far as the eye could see; an asphalt road lay under her soles seeming even more beaten than the only asphalt road back at home.

But the world was going in and out of focus. One moment she could see every grass blade in every crack — the next she saw nothing but colorful spots.

“How much do you know about the First Order and the Resistance?” Ren asked, forgoing her ears.

Rey thought the question odd, but it lessened her disorientation.

“The Resistance is heroic; they ended the Empire. Firsts kill.”

“Ah.”

“I’m not _wrong_.”

“Not entirely. It’s all you need to know in Jakku, after all. Tales.”

Ren sent her along the road. She wasn’t walking, not really, sort of… flickering through the distance, finding herself in a new spot each time she blinked.

“Yeah, tales of you riding into towns and killing frail old men.”

“Was he your friend? Lor San Tekka?” They communicated soundlessly — words simply _were_. Yet there was an acrid tang of shame to the query.

“No,” Rey replied tersely, a grain of bitterness slipping out. Ren didn’t push.

“What I meant to say is, the Order and the Resistance have been on the brink of war for years. The Order’s vision of the future is challenging, and your heroes have been crying wolf for so long no one takes them seriously anymore. The _when_ you’re seeing happened almost a decade ago, but the argument ahead is about the same thing.” Now everything coming from Ren was toneless. Detached.

Rey’s progress came to a halt by the cabin of a botched logging truck. Even Plutt’s trucks looked better. Angry voices were carrying from what passed for the truck’s cargo platform, but they were muffled as if coming from under water, the voices’ owners hidden from view by a pyramid of sawn trunks. Seeing the trees so thick stripped of their branches and roots felt like witnessing a crime.

“It was a crime,” Ren supplied. “Forests are still healing. Lumbering has been restricted for years, so…. You won’t believe how much good wood costs on the black market.… We were in the local militia, my uncle and I, a few lads from town. My father.”

The last word fell into her soul and sank like a flat rock from an unfamiliar lake shore.

That was when she realized that Ren was slowing her on purpose, reluctant to reveal — or see? — whatever had happened next. The argument sounded like an audio stuck in a loop.

“We caught a team of wood poachers as they were leaving the forest. Not the worst kind — went quietly. The town lads packed them all in the patrol car, and the three of us were supposed to take their shit truck out of the forest. I— I’ve no idea how counting trunks turned into a screaming match.”

Rey was standing by the truck’s rear wheels, looking up at the much younger, lankier Ren. But it wasn’t Ren, was it? The name ran along the seams between the bones of her skull like an electric current. _Ben_.

She couldn’t make out the words he was yelling, but his gestures were overly expressive, arms snapping up and down. An older man almost matching Ben in height — Han, father, _dad_ — was responding in kind, standing opposite him. The third man, Ben’s uncle, was leaning on the pyramid of trunks, his blue eyes hard, a shotgun at the elbow of his prosthetic right arm. Then sound poured into the world with the intensity of an open-palmed slap on the ears, and several things happened in rapid succession.

_One._

_“I’d die before seeing that shit pile of an Order set the world aflame!” Han almost screams._

_Two._

_“That’s not going to happen! The Order is about fucking_ order _!” Ben, at the top of his lungs._

_Three._

_The truck rattles._

_Four._

_“Ben.” The uncle, warningly. “Ben, you need to breathe.”_

_Five._

_Glass shatters in the cabin. The shotgun flies to the uncle’s shoulder. Ben throws his hands up in defeat more forcefully than he means to. Pieces of splintered wood scattered around the platform shoot in the air — the sharpest, the biggest, or just the one moving at the worst angle tears through Ben’s right cheek and brow.  Another sits itself deep in Han’s chest. A splinter in the heart._

_Six._

_An inhale._

_Seven._

_The shotgun fires._

Ben yanked the weapon from his uncle’s hand, so the bullet ripped a chunk of flesh from his side, missing his stomach. He fell from the platform, landing at Rey’s feet, but he managed to pull two thinner trunks from the top of the pyramid down on his uncle’s head before the older man could reload and kill Ben in turn. _He would, he would, Han was his best friend — Ben was a disappointment, not to be trusted._ Visible from where Ben was lying, Han’s hand flexed on nothing. Then he died.

“ _This_ is what I mean by the lack of control,” Ren said, following his younger self’s running figure with Rey’s eyes. “Enough.”

Except, apparently, it wasn’t enough. Rey could feel how tightly their hands were clasped there, in the real world, but instead of surfacing, the black waters were carrying her after Ben. Or was it Ren now?

Was it ever?

He became eerily silent.

_… Snoke is a very tall man. Bald. He’s old, although his exact age is hard to guess, and only half of his face moves. He leans over Ben — the younger man is on his knees, sick and exhausted — and croons:_

_“You were right to come to me. Your grandfather was much the same… I was very fond of Vader regardless. I will help you.” Snoke’s voice, once rich and strong, is whispery with age, yet it makes Rey as tense as the sound of a snake’s skin brushing sand would._

_“Here, a piece from my collection. To serve as a token of your apprenticeship.” Vader’s watch is placed onto Ben’s palm; its weight is centering. The grip of Snoke’s cold, dry fingers is unnervingly firm._

_“Follow my voice.” The watch is back in Snoke’s hand. He’s swirling it by the wristband, and oval blots of light, reflected by the golden back lid, are swimming over Ben’s hypnotized face. “Follow my lead. Follow my orders.”_

The longer Snoke was speaking, the more words of the familiar language dissolved into some cruel foreign tongue. He was doing something to Ben, time and again, countless times, and when the words alone weren’t working, Snoke pressed what looked like a small round brand to the skin along his “apprentice’s” spine, burning his will into Ben’s mind along with the red-hot pain.

Rey felt it, too.

*

“Sorry,” he rasped, his throat hoarse as if he had been screaming for real. Maybe he had. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He was lying on his side, limbs numb, with Rey opposite him. Fat tears were running down the side of her nose, along her left cheek, then into the moss. Her eyes were puffy — and the same color as the green carpet beneath her. She wouldn’t look at him.

“You didn’t do it,” Rey whispered, and he realized they were holding hands, still, or rather she was holding his — Ren’s fingers were grazing the ground while hers were locked on his wrist. Her knuckles were white, his skin red under her fingertips. It’d become purple later — for all his might he bruised like an apple. Ren’s thoughts were rolling away from him like apples from an overturned basket. He seemed unable to grasp and hold on to a single one.

“I’m sorry.” Inhaling shakily, Rey opened her hand. “I wanted to know more but didn’t mean to— to look at—”

Tears started anew, and she turned on her stomach, hiding her face in the green softness and her palms. After a momentary hesitation, he reached out, ready — not — for her to recoil from the touch, and caressed her shaking shoulders. She didn’t move, so he left his hand between her shoulder blades, circling his thumb soothingly over the protruding vertebrae at the base of her neck.

It dawned on him, then, clear in the telepathic field, that Rey wasn’t crying because she got scared or because of the pain. She cried for him.

The man Ren was supposed to be ought to despise being pitied, but no one had cried for him in a very, very long time. Not even Ben.      

“It’s all right,” he said, barely any sound coming out of his mouth.

“No, _no_ , it isn’t, it wasn’t! What— What was it?” Finally, Rey looked at him, one eye glinting between her fingers.

Ren licked his lips.

“An ancient incantation or a mantra, in a language that had been dead since long before the Blackout. It keeps my abilities at bay and allows me to proceed with my tasks without… distractions.”

“And… the burns? Oh, gods and spirits, so all those scars are from—” The latter she groaned into the heels of her palms, screwing up her eyes tightly once more.

Ren lowered his eyelids, too, watching the chamber from under his eyelashes. Specks of dust danced in orange-golden rays of the setting sun. The syntcoil was cold, and emerald-backed bugs were helping themselves to the fried eggs. Ben killed his father.

“I can’t so much as read the incantation correctly on my own. Sometimes it just won’t… hold. Pain helps. But it isn’t always like that!” he added hastily, noticing Rey flinch. “Only after the words’ influence has wavered or they’ve quieted all together.”

“Like now,” Rey concluded darkly.

“Yes. But…. I don’t know if Leader Snoke would be willing to help me now. I broke his direct order. Messed up his plans after going after you.”

“And here I thought you can come and go as you please, and the Order won’t dare to look for you.” She rolled on her side again, facing him, and moved a bit closer so that his hand stayed where it was on her upper back. Her face was wet and very serious.

“I… omitted certain details,” Ren said carefully.

“You still are. I can hear it… somehow.”

“I am,” he sighed and rubbed his eyes, bending his free hand awkwardly. “If you knew about the Order’s plans you’d spit on me and run off, tunnels or not.”

“Would I?”

He could feel her gaze on his features as if she was lightly tracing the bridge of his nose, his brows and forehead with her fingertips. He nodded, swallowing.

“So, what are you going to do after we get out of here and part ways? Go back and let him torture you back into submission?”

“It’s not about submission, it’s about—”

_Ben killed his father._

“But it is!” Rey insisted with sudden passion, nails digging into the moss near his chest. “When we rammed into each other in Tuanul, I saw— These words, they drum, and drum, and drum until everything else dims, and then they drum some more. You can barely think beyond them, can you? B—”

“Don’t.” Ren hadn’t fully acknowledged moving until he was gripping the round of Rey’s shoulder with the same hand he’d been using to caress it. He pushed her on her back, the other hand coming down hard, open-palmed, on the ground beside her head. “You don’t know what you saw, what you’re talking about.”

“If replacing a man’s grief with rage isn’t about stealing his free will, I don’t know what is.”

She had new tears in her voice and… on her forehead. Dumbly, Ren stared at the clear drops. Another one fell as he blinked.

*

Abruptly, Ren let go of her and scrambled to his feet. Rey hadn’t meant to bring his past name into the waking world but the syllable had almost rolled off her tongue anyway, unbidden.

Now Ren was standing with his back to her, his spine rigid, every muscle of his neck distinctly visible above the soft collar of his shirt. Rey sat up timidly, rendered mute by her own prior boldness.

“I get why you’d want to believe I’m being held under some vile spell,” Ren said thickly. “But the things I’ve done and felt…. There’s no one else to blame for them.”

He rummaged through his pack and turned to hand her one of their two remaining cans. Beans. Dumbstruck, Rey didn’t take it at once — with a heavy sigh, Ren put it on the cooled down syntcoil. He’d closed himself off from her, but his regret had already filled Rey’s stomach with stones.

“Eat and try to rest. Please.”

Rey nodded.

“We need to move soon,” he continued hollowly, picking up his helmet. “I’ll check out the tunnel in which the stream goes, see if it’s shallow enough to walk.”

And… he was gone. When Rey found her voice again, it was to whimper.

He’d left his stuff in the cave — his bag, and jacket, and the syntcoil — but even if he had all of it on him, he wouldn’t just… leave.

_His bag._

_His jacket._

_The syntcoil._

Clearly, she was no good at helping others — but she wanted to, needed to help him. Simply letting him be would be akin to seeing a stick-thin child sneak into the Tuanul post office in search of a radiogram that would never come — and passing by.

_The smooth grey stone and where she took it from._

Anxious, Rey started to pace around the pool, gaze snapping repeatedly to the tunnel where Ren had disappeared.

*

The abilities weren’t a secret, per se, but his family _did_ keep quiet about them. An ace up the sleeve — and a precaution against a crowd with pitchforks. The consensus was that common folk wouldn’t be particularly happy about the Palpatine-era fairytales proving to be true. People like them were so rare they could very well be made up, after all.

Aside from his uncle, his mother (who could do little with her powers), and his grandfather (who was _the_ Vader, the dark cautionary tale of their own), General Snoke was the only supernaturally gifted person Ben had been familiar with as a youngster. Before the world’s axis had started to tilt south again, Snoke used to visit their home by the lake; at the time, Snoke was still considered Ben’s mother’s unlikely ally from the days of the Rebellion. Standing on the terrace with a cigarette, he’d give Ben an appraising look as Ben and Uncle Luke did breathing exercises in the garden. Later, Ben’s mother — Leia Organa, the general of the famed Army of Resistance — would frown at the cloud of dust from Snoke’s retreating car, and Ben’s father would mutter a disgusted “sides switcher.”

… Ben’s abilities manifested when he was a boy, in a violent, destructive outburst. Upset by his parents’ fight, he broke his favorite white driftwood raft to pieces and fell — quite literally — sick from overworking his changing body. Afterwards, Luke was entrusted with teaching Ben to control telekinesis and whatever else was to come his way. Luke was thorough, but his methods had never felt like an answer, although to what question Ben couldn’t tell.

As a kid or as a young man, when in the process of _losing it_ , Ben had always been too agitated, too angry to fucking breathe. The stronger Ben became, the harder it got to suppress oncoming explosions, be they telekinetic or telepathic.

Leia and Han fought more and more often. When it wasn’t about Ben — closed doors did nothing to stop him from knowing; Han’s thoughts were so loud he might as well have shouted his heart’s desire for things to be easier into a megaphone — it was about their brewing conflict with Snoke’s military company. The latter’s ideas had become too reminiscent of imperial propaganda.

Ben, personally, would love it if private armies ceased to exist, no matter which regime they supported. They had been stealing his family from him for longer than Ben could remember, and at that point he wasn’t sure what he was angrier about — military maneuvers, logistics, questionable allegiances — or his kin’s unwavering loyalty to the Republic. By extension, he was angry about pretty much everything else.

… Ben killed his father soon after turning twenty, on a patrol with the local militia, in a scraped together lumber carrier truck. Anger helped him stay alive.

He was lying under an old fir, a war veteran of a tree, his side bloody, the wound on his face — and neck, he discovered when he had finally stopped running, and chest — throbbing promisingly. If it got inflamed, everything would be over. An early spring night around him shined with stars and ice crystals, and the still lucid part of his brain was halfheartedly trying to talk his numb body into moving. Eventually, he started thinking about Luke’s shotgun’s barrel, and how deeply his uncle must’ve been mistrusting him, and how _useless_ his teachings were. The bright, scathing spark of anger led him out of the forest.

He went to Snoke because, really, where else could he go?

_Home?_

Leader — by that time — Snoke considered anger a weapon, but Ren could never fully harness his emotions in order to wield his rage like he wielded his newly acquired sword. His rage was blind — an eyeless storm — and it wouldn’t cease, always smoldering in his subconscious.

Always but now, it would seem. He had been bracing himself for the rage that always came hand in hand with the memories, was prepared to storm out of the cave to avoid hurting Rey. Having to turn tail because he could hardly breathe in without sobbing — that, Ren was not prepared for.

He walked until the light from the chamber had disappeared in the distance. Then he ran until his lungs burned, his rasping breaths coming short and fast. The helmet was turning the sounds he was making unhuman, so at last Ren ripped it off his head. It didn’t make much difference. He wanted to scream, so he did, the unsuppressed grief bursting from deep within his chest.

_“Fuck!!!”_

Could she hear him, back in the cave? Gods, he hoped not. Ren screamed again and again, vomiting strings of obscenities and unable to stop.

After a while, he found himself on his hands and knees, drenched in sweat, shivering, and — if only for a second — blessedly empty. Echoes had died and, aside from the monotone gurgling of the water, the tunnel was quiet. Slowly, Ren sat up on his heels. He could feel no immediate danger, although normally a meltdown this intense would’ve threatened to crack the stone and bury him. He shook his head in disbelief before letting out a bitter, humorless snort. Ren bit his tongue; hysterical cackling would be overkill.

Why… _wouldn’t_ he be in control? He used to lose it; he lost it the day Han died. But he was so _young_ . An overgrown boy who’d barely been taught anything beyond breathing. Ten years had passed. Ren had been fighting assisted by his powers, and when a battle was rough, he pulled bullets from his body with his mind. He knew how to torture people by telekinesis _and_ telepathy, and he hated every moment of it so much that bile filled his mouth, yet he had done it countless times without killing or even crippling anyone. Since Ben had come to Snoke, the outbursts had only happened when his past was involved.

 _And why would that be?_       

He slumped against the wall. Sitting in the damp confines of the tunnel, the stream whispering by his outstretched legs, Ren was searching for the familiar protective barrier of anger but there was no way for him to find it in the mountain’s thick darkness. In the quiet of his mind not “assisted” by the incantation.  

Was he that stupid, or had the thing been dimming his wits as well? _Their kind’s brains only yielded to drugs or deep hypnosis_ — Snoke himself taught Ren that. _Oh, the irony._ The old man knew Ren wasn’t the type for ideological fanaticism, so to make sure his apprentice’s loyalty stayed with the First Order, Snoke made him unable to look to the other side. Ben wanted to be in control of his powers, so Snoke gave him the incantation, the _illusion_ of control, the perpetual trigger that was making Ren’s rage — and abilities — flare at the bare mention of his family. He had to admit, it was a damn elegant solution.

Effective, too. No matter how disturbed by the Order’s actions he had been before an outburst, afterwards Ren had always run back to his _wise master_ . Ready to serve. Fooling himself into thinking that being branded with a fucking car lighter was _helping_ him. While in reality….

He was useful but expendable. Should Ren go mad as he feared (or should he fall on his own sword after all), Snoke would simply look for and find, _find_ someone else. Someone like Rey.

Ren inwardly thanked what was left of his brains for deciding against taking Rey to the Order back in that armpit of a town, albeit for the wrong reasons. He owed her his gratitude, too. Only through Rey did he get a good outside view of what was going on.

Had she not broken the incantation, the pull to “the other side” he felt every time the hypnosis weakened would’ve stayed just that — a pull. Disabled trackers, spared Stormtroopers — inconsequential things he could pretend he didn’t do.

When he dialed a remote First Order base before smashing his satellite phone and ordered a clueless low ranked officer on duty to warn the Republic about the upcoming bombing under the guise of a planned diversion, he told himself it was to preserve the status quo until they had acquired the Jedi servers. Now it didn’t matter whether he was honest with himself or not — it was done and he was glad for it. Ren wished he could tell Rey the whole truth but suspected that his involvement with the preparations for a new war would scare her away. That was, if his most recent actions didn’t.

Rey. Thoughts of her helped keep the rising tide of grief from drowning him. They didn’t turn it away like the incantation would but rather… steadied his mind against the rolling waves.

The need to see her this very moment gripped him and dragged him to his feet. Donning his helmet, Ren headed back, the tunnel around him tinted watery green by the night visor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPD: Unfortunately I won't be able to post the next chapter at the usual time, I'm busy with something else at the moment and the next week is promising to be hellish, too. I'll try my best to update on the 29th or 30th but if that won't work I'll see you all in January. Happy holidays everyone and thank you for reading.


	11. Passion feeds from passion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there. Sorry, I'm late! Or early. :) I've a few busy days ahead and I'm pretty excited to share this chapter with you, so here. We. Go. Hope it was worth the wait! 
> 
> fulcrum_of_pemberley, your help and commentary are priceless. <3
> 
> CW: unsafe sex. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

_My soul will travel across the stars in search of yours and my love will guide it — I hope you’ll remember these words, Anakin. I hope you’ll continue to believe them._

_The doctors say that delivering the twins outside the clinic would pose a great danger to my health, but I’m afraid that letting our children be born under the Emperor’s own doctors’ care would be equivalent to handing this vile man new, even more powerful instruments of control over you. Palpatine turned your love for me into a leash; I won’t have him manipulate you via our Luke and Leia._

_By the time you get this, I’ll be far away. A friend will help me, and the twins will be born away from the Emperor’s reach. They will be safe, even if I have to pay for their safety with my life._

_I pray that one day you’ll find your way back to us. Not as Vader, but as a husband and father. As Anakin. I love you, I always will._

_Forgive me._

_Padme_

_— A voice recording intercepted by Imperial Intelligence._

 

~*~

 

Rey disassembled the flashlight in a futile attempt to fix whatever was broken inside of it. They had tried to change the batteries after the first march through the Outer Rim’s pitch black guts and it hadn’t helped; in the daylight, Rey discovered that most of its parts were covered in spider web-thin cracks. It might’ve overheated but Rey had a feeling her far, far away outburst was to blame.

… The flashlight is unsteady in Rey’s aching hand when its beam bounces off the dead end. A wordless shout erupts from her lips She kicks the stone, still gripping the flashlight. Her palms are hot.

Rey blinked, remembering. The flashlight had stopped working just a few hours later. Had it been a wild manifestation of telekinesis? Ren had told her it could make paint peel off walls — ruining plastic seemed… similar. Rey did need a teacher.

She didn’t bother with reassembling the flashlight. Some things just couldn’t be fixed.

A golden glint caught her eye. Ren’s wrist watch lay on the ground, half fallen out of his jacket’s inner pocket. Rey picked it up, meaning to tuck it back inside the pocket, but something prompted her to look closer. She had never seen Ren wear the watch but its previous owner must’ve had it on his wrist daily, judging by the matte spot in the middle of the otherwise smooth and shiny back lid. There were a few prominent scratches by the lid’s edge as if someone had tried to open it by brute force. Somehow, Rey doubted the scratches were Ren’s doing. She wondered if the lid could be opened at all without special instruments… and then it gave way under her touch.

My soul will travel across the stars in search of yours and my love will guide it, read the engraving on the inside. Rey closed the lid carefully. She held Vader’s watch for a long time, thinking of how strange and strong one’s love can be.   

By the time an echo carried the sound of Ren’s steps to Rey, her legs were numb from sitting on her heels. Ren stopped behind her before sinking heavily to his knees.

“I never asked if you’re still willing to learn from me,” he said, reaching past her shoulder and plucking a cracked flashlight part from the moss. “I promise, you’re in no danger from me. But I won’t hold it against you if you changed your mind because of… any of it.”

“It’s as I told you.” Rey turned clumsily and was struck by how soft his expression was, irises the warmest brown. “As long as our paths align.”

Their breaths mingled — she had been inadvertently leaning closer to him. Relief from seeing Ren was warm in her stomach, hot between her nether lips. She could kiss his wide ruddy mouth. Wanted to.

Did he know it?

Ren cupped her cheeks, tracing the shadows under her eyes with his thumbs, but instead of kissing her he breathed a solemn “thank you” against her forehead. Then he let go of her, back on his feet before Rey could as much as blink.

“For what?” she asked, confused and a little breathless.

Ren shook his head and said seemingly out of the blue, looking at her almost… shyly, “This name, Ren, was given to me to put more distance between my past and present.” Rey felt him thinking about her nearly calling him by his old name a few hours ago. The syllable still sat on the tip of her tongue. “It’s not as much a name as it is a title, something like “lord” in the language of the incantation. A non-existent title for a non-existent man. If—” He huffed out a short steadying breath. “You can call me Ben if you like.”

Rey gaped, head spinning with all the implications of what he had just told her. “Y-yes,” she stuttered, realizing he was waiting for her answer, his face in shadow now but eyes unmistakably on her, “I’d like that very much. Ben.”

 

*

 

Shivers ran along Ren’s spine at the sound of it. Allowing Rey to use his birth name seemed like a good enough way to tell her that she was right without getting the words stuck in his throat. His reaction, however…. For the second time, Ren was taken off-guard by his own body, for the cutting nostalgia had come mixed with arousal.

Between silently retreating from the cave again or casually jumping into the icy pool, he opted to go — to dash away — and check on the meat. Smooth.

The slices weren’t as dry as Ren had hoped that they’d become, but since Rey and he were about to enter cold passages again… They probably wouldn’t die if they fried the meat on the sytcoil for several extra minutes (assuming that the mutant was even edible). Or, well, Rey wouldn’t. He clearly was going to — from being so overwhelmed.

The way he’d been thinking about her ever since he noticed, back in the first cave, that his hands covered almost the entire span of her waist, was so deeply inappropriate. She was young, and he…. He had considered killing her after mentally ripping through everything private and special of hers — which he hadn’t thought much of at the time, yet— Yet. It was what Snoke would’ve done, and it had compromised whatever intentions Ren could’ve had by now. The attraction he had been feeling towards her was a dead end — or so he had been telling himself.

A whiff of mutuality — her burning cheeks under his calloused paws, the sweet throbbing emanating from her — had Ren dizzy like after inhaling opiate smokes. He loved it, but damn, was it a lot for one day.

 

*

 

They left the cave after sunset after sharing the can of beans that Rey had left untouched during the day. Sleep had evaded both of them in the purple twilight, and there had been no point to wait until morning only to return to the dense darkness of the tunnels. Leaving the stars and cool night air behind hadn’t been as hard as leaving the sun would’ve been. To think that Rey used to curse its heat!

Soon she couldn’t see a thing, holding on to Ren’s arm with both her hands. Slippery stones were striving to fling her boots off of them, grumpy rock spirits with roundish backs. According to Ren, the bed of the stream was much wider than the stream itself. It must’ve once belonged to a mountain river, probably before the war had turned Jakku into a sandpit. If Rey had the past cataclysms to thank for not having to push forward ankle-deep in bone-chilling water, she was glad for it.

In places, the tunnel’s roof was heavily adorned with stalactites, forcing them to move with extra caution. Rey clutched at Ren’s belt while his hand covered the top of her head protectively. His warnings, diffused by static, sent sparkles rushing through her veins down to her soles, burning from walking.

Rey kept the feeling close, closed off from Ren. He’d been twitchy like a live wire for a good chunk of the first twenty-four hours by the riverbed. She considered it best not to agitate him and was quietly filing her sensations away for later. The hardness of his muscles. The leathery smell of his jacket and a hint of soap and sweat from where she knew the bare skin peeked between his collar and helmet. She thought about this more than was normal, for sure.

All her other thoughts were about darkness.

The stream had been growing quicker, its spray making the stones of the riverbed even more treacherous. Both she and Ren now sported nasty bruises, their clothes wouldn’t dry, and no matter what she did, Rey couldn’t get warm.

They had set up camp on a narrow ledge a couple feet above the water. Rey lay shivering and wide awake, her back pressed against Ren’s inside the sleeping bag.  Long after Ren’s breathing had deepened, Rey’s gaze remained fixed on the barely-there light from the syntcoil, remembering the blindingly hot sands of Jakku. The tunnel had become curvy, twisting and turning like a serpentine road, one of those broken ones that snaked up the mountains from Jakku’s side, only to end in a precipice. She wondered if their journey would have a similar end. If, just as out in those sands, no matter what you did, you couldn’t stop dying. Out of habit, she hid her overexposed, strained mind inside the pebble. Ren stirred.

“What’s wrong?” he asked groggily, turning onto his other side and resting his palm on the round of her shoulder as if to make sure she was there.

Her memories were all wrong. She wanted to tell him, Rey realized, so she did.

She was too young when it happened, of course she remembered it wrongly. Her parents were pathfinders from a faraway island, not drunks from Tuanul slums. They had been trying to give Jakku a safe road to the ocean and had gone missing. Their adventures were very dangerous; they had left Rey behind for her sake, not sold three years of her labor to Unkar Plutt for booze and gasoline.

They didn’t lose the road, didn’t wander in circles in the desert, didn’t die from thirst just outside Tuanul.

Old Tekka didn’t bring Rey to their grave — a pile of stones — and she didn’t call him a liar, didn’t scoop a bunch of stones up, didn’t throw them at him, screaming in rage, until he went away. The last stone, gray and smooth, didn’t stay in her hand.

She didn’t want to die like they had, searching and searching for a way out.

“I know, I know, you won’t, I promise,” Ren — Ben — was saying in between soothing sounds, his arm secure around Rey’s ribcage, the tip of his nose pressed to her temple.

Ben was solid and oh-so warm, and Rey wanted— him, the desire bright next to her old grief. Taking his hand in hers, she brought it to her belly where her shirts had ridden up. Ben froze but as Rey splayed his fingers over her flesh, pouring every “yes” she felt into the movement, his uncertainty dissipated. With a groan, he rolled her onto her back, much like before, when she had almost called him Ben. Rey whispered the name now — Ben swallowed the sound of it, bringing their mouths together.

Rey had never kissed anyone before, never had been kissed, and kisses she had known from flimsy books all went from chastity to permission to passion. The reality wasn’t like that. There were no pauses, no wordless questions.

They kissed each other breathless.

They kissed each other hungry.

Open-mouthed and messy; on the lips, on the cheeks; on the ear-lobes and tender spots right behind them; on the collarbones, tugging at their clothes until seams started snapping. On the wrists, and palms, and lips again.

Ben cursed as the sleeping bag stretched over his shoulders when he attempted to move lower along Rey’s body. A lick of the cold air made her shiver, so he stayed where he was, nipping and sucking at her throat and fondling her breasts under layers of fabric. His rough fingertips on her hardened nipples, pinching, and tugging, and twisting ever so slightly, had her whimpering and grasping at his shirt, his biceps, at the hair at his nape.

Rey canted her hips up so that his thick thigh pressed against the apex of her legs, and Ben stuttered, an endearment on his lips crumbling to gasped syllables. He thought it, then — sweetheart — and suddenly Rey knew his long denied wish to have her. It lit her veins aglow.

Catching him in another kiss, she reached between them to unclasp his belt.

“Wait, wait,” Ben murmured against the corner of her mouth as he, in turn, caught both her wrists with his left hand. He lifted himself on his right elbow to really look at her. “This— Is this because you’re afraid you won’t get another chance to?”

The question sobered her up a bit. It had occurred to Rey at some point in the dark, that she likely would never experience a great many things, lovemaking — or just sex — among them. Had Ben picked up on that thought? He must’ve.

“No,” Rey said, nuzzling his jawline, smoothing out the tension in it.

It was true.

“Then why?” Bewildered, Ben searched her face, his breaths fanning over her well-kissed lips. They were shallow with subdued panic. “After what I did to you when we first met, I don’t deserve—”

Freeing her hands, Rey covered his mouth with her palm.

“It’s not a reward,” she insisted, then paused, short of words. It was raw, and new, and she was sure of nothing but the rightness of it. “You’re like me,” Rey answered at last. “We don’t have to be alone ever again.”

And, oh, did Ben like what he heard.

With a playful bite to the heel of her palm, he yanked at her own belt before easing her baggy pants and underwear down her thighs. Rey wiggled out of one pant leg, the other pooling at her ankle, and he caressed her naked knee. Her inner thigh. Her sex.

“Fuck,” Ben hissedi, feeling how wet she was because of him. “Fuck, Rey. Show me how….” He trailed off, planting a kiss to the spot where her neck met her shoulder, his fingers trembling slightly against her lower lips as if he was afraid to touch her there.

So she guided him again, pressing his index and middle fingers to the soft flesh to the sides of her clit. Ben was a quick learner; soon Rey was gasping and keening under him, hands fisted in his hair, feet tangled beyond hope in the fabric of the sleeping bag, her clothes, and his muscular legs. She was so close to— to—

Ben shifted his palm, cupping her sex, and dipped a finger inside her — Rey yelped at the sting that wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Wha—?” Ben lifted his head; somehow, he seemed even more dazed than she was. He was panting, the fabric over his pecs brushing against Rey’s breasts.

“Your nails.”

“Shit, sorry,” he muttered, withdrawing his hand.

They had managed to keep themselves relatively clean near water; grooming, however, had been on neither’s mind and… yeah. Ben’s nails were long and fractured, but his fingers glinted with her slick in the weak light. At the sight, his expression shifted from concerned to tantalized. 

“I can’t do any of it right, can I?” he sighed. Right before licking his fingers clean.

Rey’s mouth hung open. How he could bounce from self-deprecating to smug in the space of one sentence was beyond her.

“Just come here,” she whispered hoarsely, bringing his face down for a salty, filthily deep kiss. His belt buckle, Rey opened without touching, for she, too, was a quick learner. Unzipping his pants and pushing them down his hips was a damn tricky thing to pull off inside the sleeping bag because, unlike Rey’s, they were unnecessarily tight. But they managed, and Rey lifted his shirt up to his underarms in the process — as a bonus.

“I’m afraid I’ll hurt you if you’re not re— ah….” Ben’s eyes rolled back and a guttural moan escaped his lips as Rey carefully ran her cool fingers from the base of his cock to the tip. It was smooth and hot, hard as a leaden pipe, a vein pulsing along its... considerable length. Gods and spirits. Rey gulped. She was barely able to wrap her fingers around it.

“I am ready. But you probably will anyway.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Ben? Shut up and make love to me.”

He did.

Helping her wrap her legs around his bared waist, Ben pressed his tip to her entrance and pushed inside. He was shaking with the effort of going slowly, breathing sharply through his nose, eyes shut.

Dimly, Rey was aware that it did hurt, yet…. He had told her during one of the lessons they had had since leaving the mossy chamber, that panic fed from panic, intensifying endlessly. It turned out, in their case the same applied to pleasure. It shot from Ben to her, up from his cock and the quaking muscles of his lower belly, from his spine and expanding lungs, from his swelling heart — to hers. Down from her bruised lips and oversensitive nipples, to her core through the tree of nerves rooted in her clit, and up again. Endlessly.

When Ben sank into her as deep as her body would take him and started to thrust, Rey was overcome by the twin sensations of the burning stretch of her inner walls — and of her own tightness.

There was nothing beyond the place where they connected, arrhythmic slaps of skin on skin, their whimpers, and moans, and incoherent pleas. When he came, she felt it in her every nerve ending. His orgasm became hers and she shuddered.

Maybe she blacked out for a second, gone into sensory overload, because the next thing Rey became aware of was lying on Ben’s chest limply, with him still inside her. He had rolled them over along with the sleeping bag and was holding her in a crushing embrace, both his arms locked around her torso. And he was saying….

Beautiful.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Ben punctuated each word of praise with a kiss to the top of her head. Rey managed to lift her boneless arms and angle his face to hers by his scratchy cheeks. Or by his hair? His ears? He laughed softly, so it must’ve been the latter. Rey loved his laugh — she kissed him on it but shifting to do so made her wince.

Now that their whole beings weren’t intertwined, she could feel just how much her body had taken. Her discomfort apparent on her face, Ben carefully slipped out of her, hands on her hips shifting her weight.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” he asked with a peck on her forehead.

Rey nodded sleepily and tucked her head under his chin. Content. Lying like that, she felt content. Sated and safe.

As she was drifting off to sleep, Rey saw an island. It was unfamiliar.

But hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (⁄ ⁄>⁄ ▽ ⁄<⁄ ⁄)  
> Please, let me know what you think! I'm not a very experienced smut writer, and this scene was actually my first foray into writing smut in English, so I tried my best to make it interesting to read and not just copy and paste reylo sex scene cliches (as much as I love them).


	12. Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An extra big thank you to fulcrum_of_pemberley. I literally forgot about this chapter and sent it to her super late, yet here we are. :3
> 
> TW: starvation.  
> CW: a short discussion of possible consequences of having unprotected sex.

_ “… Leia, do you copy? <…> Don’t fret; the static is unbearable as it is. You were right and I was wrong — again. <…> You know, I insisted on keeping Rey away from him until we’d boarded the ship out of fear that he’d harm her somehow. Today, as we opened the container, I saw…. You were right. Ben wouldn’t— won’t harm that girl. Thankfully, she was brave enough to disregard my — and anyone else’s — concerns. <…>” _

_ \- A radiogram sent to the Army of Resistance main base from the ship Sea Marauder. Year 76 PBE. _

~*~

For a few precious moments upon waking up, he was at peace, the world finally as it was meant to be. They had turned onto their sides in their slumber. Rey lay with her face hidden in his bunched up shirt, so delicate compared to him.

His senses returning, he was gripped by shame. He’d lost control, overtaken by the deafening urge to  _ take _ the moment he was inside her. He’d known Rey had never been with a man before, seen it in her mind, yet instead of going slowly, he had pounded into her like an animal in rut. He would mope about not lasting very long but, given the circumstances, he supposed it was a good thing that he hadn’t.

And then Rey woke up, and nuzzled at the hollow between his collarbones, and gave him a lazy smile, and maybe Ben wasn’t such a mess after all. His chest tightened as she untangled their legs and stood up unsteadily.

“Need to clean myself, I’m all sticky.” With a small cough, she gestured at her bare groin, kicking off her pants and underwear that had still been wrapped around one of her ankles.

Ben’s cock twitched approvingly but….

Oh, but he  _ was _ a mess and on top of that — an idiot. The realization hit Rey, too; wide-eyed, she sank down where she stood as if her knees turned to jelly.

“You… don’t have a contraceptive implant, do you?” he asked and immediately bit his tongue. People of Jakku could barely afford cancer treatment; something that wasn’t a necessity in the Republic’s eyes? Stupid question.

Rey shook her head, of course. “I— I so rarely thought about actually… I completely forgot….”

The look on her face made Ben sit up hastily, pushing the unzipped sleeping bag away, and draw her to him by her shoulders. To his relief, she didn’t pull away.

“I should’ve thought about it,” Ben said, the words muffled against the top of her head. “Should’ve thought, period. I’m sorry.”

“So, what do we do?” Damn it, but her breath on his neck was distracting.

Before they found the water, even before the flashlight died, Rey had bumped into him, air leaving her in a rush and tickling his nape. He had had to slam his barriers shut, the desire to crowd her against the tunnel’s wall and steal her breath away again was so strong. Now Ben managed to gather his scattering thoughts but didn’t know how to answer her, very, very much out of his element. The only girl he’d had sex with before Rey was a young soldier from his mother’s army. She had a standard implant. Didn’t let Ben hold her, after.

Hugging Rey tighter with one arm and making sure she saw the other, Ben crossed his fingers. The gesture must not have reassured her because she slapped his chest with a firm instruction of where he’d better shove it. But as she was saying it, Rey snorted, not pulling away from him, still.

“Whatever happens, I’ll take care of you,” Ben told her seriously. Feeling her believe him was intoxicating.

While he could, he held her by his heart.

*

In the days that followed, Rey learned what could be learned about telepathy and telekinesis without using too much energy, their most vital, limited resource that they just couldn’t help but burn through. Ben was a good teacher when it came to theory, more patient and eloquent than she could’ve imagined.

His mouth was clever at more than instruction, Rey discovered as he fucked her with his tongue, pressing her jerking hips to the sleeping bag, her heels thumping against his lower back and her hands in his hair.

Only once Rey witnessed Ben lose control over his abilities — when she taught herself how to make him come with her lips and a swirl of her tongue. All his eloquence forgotten, he was babbling, thrusting up into her throat from his place on a large broken stalagmite. As she lifted her head, struggling not to choke on his semen, tangy and viscous… through the haze of her own lust, she saw droplets of water levitating all around them. Droplets of the sun, fiery in the stone’s eonian night and light and the half-light of the syntcoil. They rained on them as he came to.

Moments of shameless passion or, later, tenderness, made everything else more bearable. Darkness, the cold. Even the hunger that was growing more acrid as their meager provisions were dwindling. The meat was digestible and that was the best that could be said about it — until the last of it ran out, leaving them craving it and having only enough energy to hold each other. And walk.

Pangs of hunger reminded Rey of her childhood at its worst.

_ Five.  _ Food at the junkyard was cooked and served in a common pot. It was so spicy Rey’s eyes teared from the smell alone. She didn’t want to eat that. She wanted flapjacks, and dry fruits, and her mama. After a week of her refusing the broth, Plutt slapped Rey on the back of her head. Not too hard — he wasn’t angry, just annoyed — but Rey bit through her tongue. The taste of hot pepper and blood got burned into her pallet that day.

_ Nine _ . Officially, she hadn’t been Plutt’s slave anymore — different wording, same thing — for almost a year, but only now did she become an angry enough brat to belt off from the junkyard to look for another job. Except, in Jakku, there were none, and she was too afraid to leave the sandpit. What if  _ they _ came back and she wasn’t there? In the end, Rey had to swallow her pride and return to Plutt, as an employee, if only by name.

_ Thirteen _ . Rey had never been vaccinated, it turned out. The scarlet fever that had ripped through the slums hadn’t killed her, but the malnourishment just might. Rey couldn’t scavenge, too weak after the illness, and if she didn’t scavenge, she didn’t eat. A Tuanul working girl called Mashra took pity on her. Rey learned an awful lot that month, hearing things through lizard-shit walls. It had made her wary of men — until Ben. Even as Ren, she’d never been afraid of him in  _ that _ sense. Somehow.

_ “Nineteen?!” _

When Rey admitted that she hadn’t been so open with anybody for nearly fourteen years after being left at approximately five, Ben made the calculations.

“Does it bother you?” she asked, suddenly anxious. Their age difference didn’t seem wrong at all to her, but what if it was? Edges of morality were blurred in Jakku — that, Rey knew.

“No, sweetheart. Even if it did, it probably wouldn’t stop me — I’m disturbingly good at justifying bad decisions to myself.” His hand tightened on hers. “It’s…. My mother was nineteen when she met my father. He was a couple years older than I am now, actually.”

The helmet was eating most of his intonations but there was a streak of longing in Ben’s imprint in the telepathic field.

_ Shallow water by the shore. Frogs and lilies. _

“You miss them.” Rey clapped her free hand over her mouth, but Ben remained calm, if a little surprised.

“I don’t know. That part of me is kind of… numb. Maybe I’ve been missing them for so long I can’t distinguish the feeling anymore.”

“Do you think you could… find your mum?”

Ben let out a short humorless laugh — a bark through the speaker piece. “Oh, I know exactly where she is. As for contacting her…. After— after dad, there still might’ve been a chance she’d… let me be, at least. But I have served her arch nemesis for the last decade, have been doing Snoke’s dirty work for him. Now she’d rather see me as she would any other First Order lackey — dead.”

Rey blinked, darkness pouring into her wide-blown pupils. She was privy to a few of his memories of a petite woman with regal posture. Ben had her eyes, deep-brown and deeply intelligent.

There she was, braiding her hair into an intricate style. Writing something by candlelight, long flames smutting the air. Teaching little Ben to swim, with her husband laughing somewhere out of sight.

None of it lined up with what Ben was saying.

“Ben, who  _ is _ your mother?”

“Leia Organa,” he answered after they’d walked in silence for quite some time.

_ “The _ Leia Organa?!” Rey choked. “Founder and general of the Army of Resistance?”

“The one and only.”

It was Rey’s turn to fall silent. This development explained certain things — and swapped them with new questions. Was it even possible that Leia Organa, the very rebel who had overturned the Emperor, and Vader, said to be the Emperor’s right hand, belonged to the same family? And Ben’s uncle? He was her famous brother, then, the rebellion’s hero, so beloved by people that, growing up, Rey had thought him a myth, someone from the same shelf as stories of lionhearts and winning bets with demons. And this man had drawn a bead on his own nephew instead of helping him?

Anger rose in her like bile. Physically repulsed, Rey found herself daydreaming of acquainting the traitorous “hero” with her loyal bat. That one had been lost for good but, as the saying went, a girl could dream.

When Ben caught wind of her fantasies, he all but ripped the helmet off and kissed her until her knees buckled. The helmet, he dropped by their feet but they ended up kicking it away and had to light the syntcoil in order to find it.

…

“Ben, how old are you, exactly?”

“T-twenty nine.”

*

The tunnel was narrowing; the recurrence of claustrophobic surroundings mixed with their gut-twisting hunger made everything feel surreal, like a dream Ben was about to wake up from. There were moments when he wasn’t so sure he wanted to, pressed to Rey’s warm body. (Wasn’t she too warm? Did she have a fever?) Others were nightmarish, when he tried to lull his hunger to sleep, gulping down scalding water from an old can.

After hours of dragging their abused feet they had finally found a spot to sleep on, a stone ledge barely wide enough for the two of them. They drifted off, tangling their naked limbs together for warmth, too tired to do anything but breathe each other in.

They needn’t have bothered looking for a dry place, it turned out. Ben was having a dream, a dream that felt like home — about soup from the winged mutant boiling above greenish fire in a hearth from flat dark-gray rocks — when a gush of water booted them both out of their slumber. They scrambled away like a pair of panicked cats. The sleeping bag’s outer layer had protected them from the spray but there was no hiding from the tunnel’s chilly air. Between shivering and grabbing for their clothes, stashed by the wall, away from the stream, it took them a few heartbeats to realize—

“It’s coming from above!” Ben froze at Rey’s exclamation, following her pointing finger. His socks forgotten, he reached for the helmet, the syntcoil light not being enough to see properly.

As the green of the night vision chased shadows away, he saw a rift in the tunnel’s roof, long like a ripped seam, with jagged edges and water pouring from it in broken jets. They had placed their sleeping bag right beneath it.

“The f—” Ben stopped abruptly, hearing Rey’s breath hitch.

“Rain,” she whispered reverently.

It… smelled of rain, Ben discovered as he took the helmet off again. Of watered soil and plants. And the jets had brought twigs, and dead leaves, and bits of dirt. Above them was….

A way out.

Possibly.

It was certainly too good to be true. Or did some almighty being clap its hands —  _ okay, enough with the caves! _ — and open the stone over their heads? The rift could narrow into a palm-wide crack, as had countless passages before it, and leave them drained by the climb. They had no means to restore their energy now.

Yet, they waited until the jets weakened to a drip — and longer.

“It’s about three feet wide and almost vertical!” Rey shouted down, voice distorted by the helmet. The roof wasn’t very high, so when she climbed on Ben’s shoulders and cautiously brought herself to her full height, the rift pulled her in to her hips. “There’s a slope but it’s no more than twenty degrees!”

An image of Rey’s elbows and knees pressed to the sides of a wall niche flashed through Ben’s mind. It looked like a plan.

*

Rey gathered the few things that mattered and secured them on her body because the backpack would likely slow the climb. A couple trinkets she was too sentimental about to part with — a bell from a friendly goat’s neck; an orange rag doll from Mashra’s house — went into her pockets, same as her comb. Her wrenches and other instruments she tied into her blanket and wrapped it around herself like a tight sling.

Ben was leaving almost all his possessions behind, bearing only his sword, knife, med kit, and helmet — the latter he gave to Rey, for she was to climb first. He helped her up again, and as Rey caught the last glimpse of the glimmering syntcoil, her vision blurred. Maybe someone else would find it one day. Maybe one day it’d become the mountain’s burning heart, the chemical reaction within it causing tectonic plates to bend and sigh.

With no way to dry it properly, their sleeping bag was pretty much ruined which was a shame. It had saved them as much as the syntcoil had.

Rey had wondered how Ben would get into the rift after her, having nothing to grip at in order to pull himself up, but he had told her not to worry. She couldn’t help herself, though. When she was about seven feet in, there was a grunt and clatter of small stones. With a start, Rey realized that he had hauled his body up telekinetically. For a long moment she listened to him pant, cold sweat sliding down her back.

_ Don’t pass out, please, don’t pass out.   _

She tried to look down but tilting her head with the heavy helmet on threatened to unsettle her balance.

“I’m alright, sweetheart,” he said, sensing her unease. “Let’s move.”

So they did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, I'm currently taking prompts for short ficlets. Send them my way if you have some! :D (Just no non-con or MCD, please; I'm game for smut as long as it's not too kinky.)


	13. Naboo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ☆ヾ(*´・∀・)ﾉ fulcrum_of_pemberley rocks! ヾ(・∀・`*)ﾉ☆
> 
> CW: weight loss

_ “We were calling General Organa our hero while ignoring — pointedly and arrogantly — her warning calls. Yet she and her people saved us all at the very last moment, stopping the evil that was the First Order from wiping the Hosnian Republic out. Our gratitude is—” _

_ \- A fragment of a senatorial speech. Year 76 PBE. _

~*~

It was starting to rain again when they finally made it out, dawn hiding behind low clouds. For the last dozen feet or so, Ben’s whole body shook so badly he truly  _ was _ afraid of sliding back down this natural air shaft — not that the climb had been any easier even in the beginning, the stone still slick with rain water. How Rey had managed it, he had no idea.

She had been his eyes on the way up, guiding him around sharp or unsteady rocks, but she, herself, couldn’t actually turn and see how he was faring. Every time Ben felt he was about to lose his grip on the walls of the shaft she would go still above him, just… listening to the stones shift under his limbs. Willing them to stay put.

He loved her.

Then Ben had seen his torn hands almost shining in the barely there light. And then they were out.

Rey’s chest was heaving like she’d run a mile; Ben certainly felt like he had — ten, ten miles; his very bones were  _ throbbing _ with exhaustion — even though the climb was hardly a hundred feet and it wasn’t a sheer cliff. The gravitational pull of the darkness they’d been climbing away from had made the distance that much longer.

Rey’s hands flew to the helmet’s fastenings and as she was fumbling with them a coughing fit tore through the speaker piece. Ben hastened to sit up to help her, ignoring his body’s protests. After the coughing had stopped, they knelt leaning against each other, her chin on his shoulder, and breathed together. The morning air was oh-so sweet, and the clouds had parted, and there was the sunrise. Ben picked the helmet up and dropped it back into the shaft.

*

The sun was in her eyes — which shouldn’t’ve been possible because, after wandering in the dark for so long, Rey had started to question its existence… and it was still too soon after the dawn. Her entire life, the sun rose  _ behind _ the Outer Rim, so— so—

“Have we crossed the mountains?” Rey asked in wonder, the words muffled by Ben’s jacket. She hadn’t thought she’d ever see the eastern side of the sky. It was translucent. Tranquil. Pink as the shells of the winged mutant’s eggs. Golden like Ben’s irises. The world down below was awash with mist.

“Welcome to the Naboo Plain,” Ben whispered against her temple.

They had made their way down the sloping mountainside by midday, their progress delayed, somewhat, by a grassy patch full of wild berries.

“These are edible!” Ben exclaimed, rushing forward, and so their track of time was lost. Rey’s stomach cramped afterwards but it was better than stabs of hunger. She reveled in the purple stickiness of her cheeks and fingers.

When they resumed walking, the mist had evaporated, revealing a plaid blanket of fields upon fields upon fields, brown and bare or covered in straw.

“I thought it’d be greener,” Rey mused at one point.

Ben shrugged but squeezed her hand reassuringly. “It’s past the harvest season. All the greens will be back in half a year, you’ll see.”

A country road sprang up underneath their soles as soon as they cleared the foothills, pants covered in reddish dirt up to mid-thigh and withered blades of grass stuck in every fold.

“Which way do you want to…?” Ben asked, avoiding her eyes for some reason. He was holding her hand, still.

Bewildered, Rey looked around. Fields stretched in either direction with nothing of significance in sight.

“I’m not sure. We need to… find a town or a village, I guess.”

“Our paths are still aligning, then?”

Ben’s expression was guarded, voice carefully neutral. Tapping into the telepathic field, though, Rey found the image of him blurry with anxiety. The deeper he buried his worries, the more they showed; like splinters poking through his skin from the inside. His barriers started to rise upon him noticing her attention but he must’ve thought better of it, leaving himself open for her scrutiny.

“Where do  _ you _ want to go, Ben?”

Rey believed that she she’d known the answer since he had almost kissed her in the emerald cave, yet she needed to hear him say it. Ben understood.

“Not back to the First Order. I want to get away from all of it, as far as possible. And I want you to come with me.” The words left him in a rush; he was holding her hand in both of his now, conscious of her bruised knuckles and scratched palm. Finally meeting her gaze, Ben uttered, “Please.”

Suddenly, Rey felt as if a live wire was wrapped around her hand, the emotions behind his proposal were so... raw. Overwhelming. Scary. She’d spent years in the dunes, the ocean a distant dream, and now it was rushing into her heart in its entirety. She tightened the walls surrounding her mind to protect everything  _ Rey _ from drowning in  _ Ben _ . She lifted her free hand and pressed her fingertips to the seam of his lips, sealing them. Holding her breath, Rey nodded.

Ben’s answering embrace was crushing.

*

There were no refugees on the roads. The new war hadn’t happened. He needed to tell Rey about it. Needed to tell her that he was partially to blame for the fact that it  _ could have _ —

*

They found an inn as the shadows were getting longer. Or a motel — Ben said that was the word on this side of the Rim. A seedy place — tinted window panes; rivulets of rust on the sooty walls from multiple water barrels on the flat roof; dirty yard — but better than an abandoned barn. They had seen plenty of those throughout the day; they’d stopped to rest in one but hadn’t lingered there.

The motel was empty, save for its bored owner: now that the harvest had been moved to warehouses in the cities of Naboo and all of the seasonal workers had returned to their families, this remote establishment only housed occasional travelers and, by Ben’s assessment, gangs when they were on the road which, thankfully, was not today. 

The money Ben still had in his pockets bought them a room with a shower and a microwave and a few boxes of unkillable synthetic meals. (Or it looked that way; Rey was almost sure Ben didn’t actually  _ give _ the owner any of the polymeric bills he’d shown the sleazy man).

“There’s nothing of interest about us,” Ben said as the owner was handing him a key. The latter blinked as if in a daze and pinched the bridge of his meaty nose, head filled with fog up to its balding top.

“Nothing of interest about you,” he repeated dumbly, then blinked again. “The boiler needs fifteen minutes to heat and the hot water runs for fifteen or so, too. The phone’s in the hallway, control tablet in your room has the internet access — both free but don’t get lippy, I’ve got bills to pay.” With that, he waved them off, turning his attention back to fiddling with a static-spitting radio. The telltale opening notes of the news broadcast got through the static but in that moment the radio decided to turn itself off all together. The owner cursed, and Ben hurriedly led Rey away with his arm around her shoulders. There was a sound of a fist meeting hard plastic as they rounded the corner.

The room was spacious enough by Rey’s standards, though to anyone from this side of the mountains it would probably feel like a closet. The bed occupied most of it and only one bedside table fit between the mattress and the wall. On it, the control tablet was sort of… perched, the thick braid of wires connecting it to the building’s systems too short to allow the tablet to lie on its back panel. A windowless nook contained the simplest bathroom; it had a door, and there was a toilet, and a shower consisting of a faucet and a drainage hole in the tile floor — and all of it was so good Rey could cry.

She passed out with a half-eaten boxed meal still in her lap, exhaustion pulling her under like quicksand. She dreamed of the last time she slept in a bed and not a hammock — of a spare cot in the kind working girl’s shack. Of repetitive, unnatural, sad sounds penetrating the walls.

*

He had helped stop it from happening — that’s what counted, right? Ben had to  _ say something _ , but Rey was so tired she wasn’t even picking up on the shame radiating from him, so he let her rest. There was still time.

*

Rey woke up to Ben nuzzling at her temple. It was a nice thing to wake up to.

“Shower?” he murmured against her hairline. “I got the boiler ready.”

She let him pull her to her feet. As they were removing each other’s clothes, their touches were tender but far from sexual. On the last stretch of their journey through the caves, Rey could only bear washing her face from time to time, the cold water bringing her to the verge of tears, and Ben hadn’t been faring that much better. Then, the climb and the foothills after the rain…. To put it plainly, they were gross.

Rey moaned when hot jets ran down her face, and shoulders, and breasts. Ben’s hands dwarfed the brick-like motel soap. He ended up doing most of the washing, with Rey half-asleep in front of him: the bones in her arms had straight up… dissolved after she was done soaping, so Ben had washed her hair and moved her under the spray to soak while the precious fifteen minutes trickled into the sewage.

“Shit,” he muttered, and Rey’s eyes flew open. The water was turned off, the tiny bathroom steamy and quiet save for the dripping faucet. And Ben. His palms were on her ribs and he stared intently at her midsection. “I need to feed you better,” he explained, catching her questioning look and tracing the undersides of her breasts with his thumbs.

Rey glanced down at herself. She’d been thinner. They had been completely out of food for less than a week, and… and…. Still, a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth at his words. Sweet. Ben was sweet. Not so sleepy anymore, she took ahold of his wrists and brought his palms higher, where a blush was spreading down to her rosy nipples. Where her heart was beating for him.

“Are you sure? You can barely keep your eyes open,” he rasped, yet he pinched the hardened peaks slightly, and as Ben stepped closer, his hardening length brushed against Rey’s belly;  _ he _ was becoming more assured by the minute.

She nodded frantically, a whimper escaping her.  _ Wanton _ , Rey thought and didn’t care. Behind the locked bathroom door, she could pretend for a little longer that the outside world didn’t exist. That, like in the caves, it was just her and Ben, just  _ her _ Ben, and as long as he didn’t pledge loyalty to Snoke, his past deeds mattered not.

But didn’t they really?

Turning Rey to face the wall, Ben spread his enormous palm between her shoulder blades, his other hand firm on her hip. Back arched, goosebumps rose on her arms as her chest and cheek met the tile, wet and cool against her flushed skin. She had to brace her palms against the wall, too, when Ben whispered, nibbling at her earlobe, “Press your legs together.”

She did — she had to lock her knees, bringing the right one forward so that her inner thighs touched — and his arm slid around her waist. He almost picked her up off of the floor; Rey lifted onto her tip-toes, now grasping at the tile for purchase to no avail. Condensate was making her fingers sprawl on the smooth surface, and Ben’s free hand on her sex — tugging at coarse curls there, carefully spreading the pink folds — was making Rey whine and squirm in his grip.

_ Stone. _ His muscles, and bones, and vocal cords were from stone.

“No wiggling,” Ben rumbled before sheathing his cock between her inner thighs, just below her cunt. The tip caught on Rey’s clit, and her forehead thudded against the wall. Stars flew under her eyelids. The friction that followed as he rocked his hips had her gasping, and the stars sped up, smudging into infinity. Ben mouthed something against her nape and sucked a line of bruises onto the slope of her neck.

Their minds weren’t in sync this time, but there were glimpses of him, falling onto her like droplets of his sweat mixed with water. Rey knew from them that the friction and her slick on his shaft were making him see stars, too.

Were those the same stars?

The cramped bathroom, his tight embrace — yet somehow it felt as if they were separated by lightyears, the real world tugging her away. Ben felt it, feared it, so he held her ever closer, and the way his muscles were shifting against Rey’s shadow-thin frame and his cock was rubbing against her swollen clit, was— was—

Rey came with a hoarse shout, her inner walls clenching on nothing and legs shaking violently from thighs to toes. Ben wasn’t finished, his torso still flush with hers, his arm around her middle supporting her. Reluctantly, Ben drew back, curling over her and stroking himself with his free hand. Rey reached behind her blindly, wanting to touch him. Her palm ended up on his thigh — and she was too blissed out, nearly slumping down the tile, to correct her course. She caressed his thigh, and he kissed her shoulders until a deep growl ripped through his diaphragm and rolled down Rey’s spine, and his spent shot all over her lower back and ass in hot ropes.

… Ben cleaned them both with the lukewarm water, and dried them with motel towels, and carried Rey to bed. Under the covers, he gathered her in his arms once more and fell asleep with a sigh. Rey’s eyelids were drooping but she fought sleep, wanting to look at Ben’s peaceful face just a little longer.


	14. No need to cry, sweetheart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? A surprise update?! Yes, yes it is. :3 It's rather short and angsty, so I decided to post this - penultimate! - chapter now and bring you the last one during the weekend. Our story is about to make a full circle, so this might be a good time to re-read the first chapter. If you feel like it, of course. ;)
> 
> As always, the biggest thank you goes to fulcrum_of_pemberley. And to _you_ if you're reading this and sticking with the story.

_ “In a world born from monstrosities, _

_ is it scarier to discover that you love a monster _

_ or that you love that monster anyway?” _

_ \- Poems of the Plain. Vol. 3 _

_ “Chest pain, cough, fatigue, fever, shortness of breath.” _

_ \- An incomplete list of pneumonia symptoms. _

~*~

Ben was out cold. As Rey slipped out from underneath his heavy arm and leaned on the headboard, he rolled on his stomach and hugged a pillow, his breath never changing. Rey stopped herself from brushing his unruly black hair away from his brow, his features relaxed. Overcome with tenderness, she shook her head.

_ Let him rest. _

The tinted window — the relic from the days of odd dawns and sunsets near acrid due to the air pollution — only let in that much light, submerging the room into a perpetual twilight. Ben’s watch was nowhere to be seen, so she tapped on the control tablet’s display to check the time. It was just before noon, and soon Rey realized, not a little surprised… that she was bored. Idly, she examined a row of greenish icons on the black home screen and touched the one activating the internet connection. If its speed was at least somewhat decent she could find something to read….

Blocky green letters informed her that the connection was lost. Frowning, Rey reached to the braid of wires to see if all of the cables were plugged in. There was a tear in the internet cable, duracopper fibers sticking out from their rubber coating. Sluggish as her mind had been, Rey was absolutely sure the tear hadn’t been there the prior evening.

The world slowed down.

It couldn’t be Ben’s doing, could it?

The motel owner’s radio had broken down right in front of them, too. Was Ben trying to prevent the outside world from intruding into their tiny bubble? But why? Rey looked at the man sleeping beside her, uneasiness coiling in the pit of her stomach like a snake in the hot shade. She didn’t want the “real world” here because it was  _ Ren’s _ reality and  _ Ben _ was still so fragile. But were his reasons the same? Rey already knew the worst about him… didn’t she?

Cautiously, as not to disturb Ben, Rey lifted her mental shields and got out of bed but as she was tiptoeing around the room in search of her pants and shirt, he patted the mattress where Rey had just been lying, the sheet still warm.

“Sh-h-h, I’m here.” Rey put a soothing hand on the back of his head, willing him to go back to sleep. “I’ll be right back. Just getting more food.”

With a calmed hum, Ben dropped his head on the pillow, face down. Very quietly, Rey left the room. The hallway was empty. The threadbare carpeting hid her steps, her bare feet itchy from its scratchy surface. As she had hoped, unoccupied rooms weren’t locked; palm sweaty, Rey turned a random door handle and entered a room down the hallway. It was almost identical to theirs; here, the control tablet worked just fine and its wires were long enough. When Rey tapped on the internet icon, the news came pouring in automatically. Heavily, she sat down on the floor.

It turned out, all hell had broken loose.

The First Order had been about to start another war, their plans uncovered mere hours before the launch of guided missiles… the day Ben had saved her from the rockslide. Had he come after her? Or had he been running for his life after catching wind of the Resistance being on their tail?

His name — Ren, Ren of the First Order — was listed among known architects of this madness right under Snoke’s. Green letters shimmered in the room’s twilight. Bright. The revelation was… too bright. Rey screwed her eyes shut, holding her rioting mind tight.

_ Don’t wake him up. _

_ Not true. _

_ Don’t wake him. _

_ Not— _

Except, he had told her himself that if she’d known, she would’ve spit on him and run off. His own mother would rather see him dead.

Behind Rey’s eyelids, tiny green lightnings started to strike.  _ War _ . Rey thought of Jakku of all things, of its poisoned soil, of its sands, of the deadly pollution guarding its borders. Of mutations in its natives’ bodies, of R’iia and broken compasses, of lost roads and the ocean’s gleam she could never make out in the distance.

Wasn’t it enough destruction?

Rey’s hands fisted in her hair, a pained hiss escaping her lips, and teeth, and throat, and soul, followed by a coughing fit that wouldn’t stop until tears were streaming down her face. Ren of the First Order had planned to set the world on fire. He’d shown her his deepest regrets, but as she’d looked inside his mind Rey had found no trace of him regretting  _ this _ . How could that be if he was genuine about renouncing the Order and Snoke’s mastership over him? It didn’t make any sense, Rey  _ knew _ the truth about Ben. 

Right?

Sweat was trickling down her back and sides; Rey pulled her knees to her chest and gripped her shins so hard the skin turned white under her fingers. She’d known the truth about her parents being pathfinders, too. She’d known an awful lot of “truths.” Rey had always been so  _ eager  _ to believe in lies; showing her a few touching pictures really was all it took to…. 

Were any of the memories Ben had shown her real? They felt real, but Rey still knew so little about Ben’s powers — and he was the teacher. He controlled what she was aware of. 

And his feelings towards her, his affection, his warmth, his l—

A hysterical chuckle broke through her lips; Rey pressed her palm over her mouth, afraid that more coughing would follow.  _ Too good to be true _ . No one ever truly cared about her, her own mother and father didn’t — why would a powerful warlord? Maybe he wanted her for her powers. Maybe he got off on manipulating people.

Those were flimsy  _ why _ s, but the wave of fever rising inside Rey wouldn’t let her look at them closer, instead pushing her mind deeper into a panic state.     

_ He wasn’t “Ben,” he was a monster _ . And Rey had been dumb for believing him a victim. How ironic, then, that he had been the one to open her eyes on how good she was at lying to herself.

Rage exploded in her chest, awfully like a live feed of a nuclear strike.

Blind with tears, Rey stood up from her spot on the floor by the bedside table. She didn’t bother to turn the tablet off. Her chances were slim —  _ he _ had only taught her the theory, after all — but she was going to try and do it anyway. Moving was taking a double effort as if she were underwater. (Rey  _ supposed _ moving underwater felt like that; she was  _ from Jakku.) _ She was back in their room in a few seconds, standing over him, her trembling hand outstretched.

He was sleeping and then — wasn’t.

“Rey?” There was a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth. It didn’t have time to fade as Rey snapped her fingers, visualizing her bat hitting his unprotected skull.

It worked.

He was out again, though, Rey knew, not for long because she was still too weak to effectively hold him under. He’d taught her oh-so many things. She’d go be sick except she dreaded opening the bathroom door.

The phone was where the owner had said it would be. On the wall beside it, there was a list of emergency numbers. Rey made a call.

*

“Prostitution is illegal on the Plain, you know,” a police officer said nonchalantly.

_ Hickeys. _

Rey clapped her hand to her neck, biting her tongue against exclaiming in protest. Was she objecting to the assumption or to the sounds of boots hitting flesh she could still hear inside her head?

She had made herself  _ look. _

“Hey, sweetheart, no need to cry,” the officer chuckled. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. The Hosnian Republic is in your debt.”

Then the police helicopter was gone, and there was nothing but drops of blood on the carpeting. On the concrete steps by the motel’s entrance. In the dust.

Rey asked the owner for directions and he drew a map for her, eager to get rid of Ren’s whore. She walked until she found a wider road and a lonely bus stop. She waited. When a bus came, she bought a ticket with Ren’s money. The bus plied between two cities of the Naboo Plain — Rey didn’t care to hear their names — and the ride was long. 

For the first hour, she’d still been shell-shocked. By the second, she started to hear the sounds surrounding her: rustling of the wheels, murmuring conversations of other passengers, unfamiliar songs on the radio, and the driver’s whistling in tune with the music.

By the third, Rey finally heard what her heart had been saying: she’d chosen wrong, had let her initial fear and disgust  _ make the choice for her _ — and it was killing her. Rey’s chest hurt so much she couldn’t even weep, only able to breathe shallowly.

By the fourth, the cough started anew.

*

The Army of Resistance had a recruitment point in every major city. Even though finding it didn’t take too much effort, persuading people there that Rey needed to speak to none other than Leia Organa sapped the last of Rey’s energy from her. But at last she was given a handset. As soon as she was done talking with the general, Rey collapsed.

She had had pneumonia, Rey learned later. She had been bedridden for a long time, drifting in and out of consciousness. They transported her to the Resistance main base in the capital while she was sick. There she met General Organa in person.

From Leia Organa, she learned that Ben was the one who had stopped the war from happening. The media claimed that the big victory belonged to the Resistance and Hosnian Republic’s joined forces, but while the allies had stormed the Order’s bases, taking countless prisoners and arresting all the data that the Order hadn’t had time to destroy, none of it would’ve been possible without Ben. The older woman allowed Rey to listen to the recorded phone conversation — the record found on a remote, less significant base — Ben had had with some unsuspecting First Order lackey.  _ “… a diversion on Leader Snoke’s orders. Tell them that missiles will hit before midday, let them run.” _

Rey’s conscience had only let her reveal the bare minimum, the  _ bones _ of what Ben and she had gone through, of what they had become to each other, so she had no idea, truly, why the general of the Resistance hadn’t kicked her out as soon as Rey’d come to. General Organa had taken her in instead. Her medics had treated to Rey’s illness; after pneumonia had been defeated, the Resistance intendants started finding small tasks for Rey to do. Months went by. The trial over Ben was dragging, no end to it in sight, but General Organa kept sharing her insight into the bureaucratic intricacies with Rey — and such openness Rey really, really couldn’t understand.

After all, Ben had been wrong — his mother desperately wanted him to live. And if he died at the hands of the Republic with its near feral ideas of justice, Rey would be the one to blame.

 

_ Cut to the present time. _

 

When Finn turned the truck to return them to their boat, Rey saw Ben in the rearview mirror. Standing by the house, unmoving as if he wasn’t… alive.

She had wanted to say something, but there was a lump in her throat. 

When Rey saw the ocean again, her emotions ebbed. The sight of the  _ Marauder _ calmed her completely, taking away her uncertainty.

Ben had been mistrusted, abused, and exiled, and Rey had been an accomplice to all of it, yet as the  _ Marauder _ was about to cast off, Rey jumped down onto the pier, unnoticed. She needed to see him even if he didn’t want to see her. She would… go to the nunnery, after, to do laundry, or clean toilets, or do whatever they’d let her for six months. Or she’d take shelter in one of the abandoned cottages; Rey wasn’t a stranger to the rough life, she could make it work.

She dared not hope for….

In the caves, Ben had often talked of fate. Rey had been skeptical. Then, during her stay with the Resistance, she had met Finn again, who had only survived — and brought the info that had started it all to the Resistance — because he’d found Rey’s speeder with the canister full of drinking water still strapped to its side. If that wasn’t fate….

Ben was. He was her fate, for Rey had recognized the Ahch-To grasses from her visions that she had mistaken for hallucinations and dreams. If only she would have recognized her future sooner!

Rey watched from the pier until the ship disappeared into the inky vastness of the sea. The roar of the truck’s engine must’ve woken up the entire island.  _ I am coming. Wait for me. _ Slowly, Rey started up the mountain road.

_ Wait for me. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't be too harsh on Rey, okay? >.< But please, do let me know what you think!


	15. The approaching summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another early update because I want to be free of this pain (lol) and I'll probably be busy later. ;) As always, I'm very grateful to fulcrum_of_pemberley and to _you_ if you're reading it.
> 
>  
> 
> TW: very brief suicidal thoughts.  
> CW: mentions of drugs and of a possibily of dying from drowning in puke while drugged; thoughts of possible pregnancy (no one gets pregnant, it's just something Rey thinks about briefly).

He had called for Rey when they’d first woken him up from the coma. Her distraught face had been the last thing Ben had remembered, so when he had regained consciousness, handcuffed to a hospital bed, and she had been nowhere near….

In hindsight, Ben understood why his mother and uncle would hide her from him. He knew how his fear looked like from the outside, and he had been scared shitless. If his brain hadn’t still been addled with the drugs the Republic had been pumping into him, it would’ve looked much worse than a telekinetically shattered window and the mental slap Luke had gotten for trying to probe Ben’s mind.

Ben hadn’t helped the situation by not letting anyone see into him. If he had, if they’d sensed that he hadn’t been screaming Rey’s name in rage, maybe either Luke or Leia would’ve actually believed what they’d seen. Maybe….

But Rey had done nothing to prove them wrong, either. She’d stayed away — had let them keep her away — until there had been no other options, so she must’ve…  _ wanted _ to be away from him. Such was the choice Ben had been expecting her to make from the start. He’d been bracing himself for it, had dreaded it, had attempted to delay the inevitable — and now that everything had been said and done, Rey’s choice made months ago, he felt empty.

Empty on the empty island. At least Luke had finally left him alone. And Ben was alive — an  unlikely bonus he wasn’t sure how to deal with or how it even came to be, if Ben was being honest. The Republic was ignorant of the extent of his abilities but had taken the threat very, very seriously, assuming Ben to be some all-powerful evil wizard. And, damn, were they salty about it. They had fucking melted his sword, Leia had told him — not that he’d been listening. (He had been, to her every word.)

So how was he still standing?

Ben stood outside Luke’s cottage long after the truck had driven away. When his teeth started clattering and he couldn’t take nature’s eager kisses anymore, he finally traipsed inside. The truth was bitter; he brought it on himself. But he was alive.

_ Hux hanged. _

_ Snoke had blown himself and a bunch of his bodyguards up before the Resistance could capture him. They said only the lower part if his corpse had been found — how typical was it of Ben’s old tormentor to be mysterious and creepy even in death. _

Ben was alive.

He lifted three or four buckets of icy water from the well, poured them into a big-ass pot, and kept it on the electric stove until the water was boiling, and scrubbed his skin raw. He took himself in hand halfheartedly but his throat became dangerously tight when he was still only half-hard, so he stopped, letting the arousal fade.

Rummaging through his supplies, Ben found Vader’s watch, the clock hands motionless but as hypnotically shiny as ever. Clenching it in his fist, Ben made his way down the hillside behind the cottage where rows upon rows of now dismantled windmills glowed white against the verdant slope. So that’s how Luke powered the  _ Jedi _ servers. Briefly, Ben wondered where his uncle had relocated them and whether the new location was a secret, too.

The thought didn’t last, replaced by a bitterness rooted elsewhere as Ben reached the edge of the high shore, a bare rock overlooking the ocean. With a cry of sudden fury, he hurled the watch into the unkind waves.

A few brownish birds shot up, alarmed, from their nests in the grass, drawing low circles over the water and the boulders that broke its steely surface closer to the shore. The boulders’ stone heads were round, polished by licks of sea foam — kisses that lasted for millennia.

_ The drop would be short but effective. _

Ben watched the birds until his breathing slowed. His chest hurt but it ought to, Ben supposed, for he had just ripped out the last piece of  _ Ren- _ who he’d been for the last decade. Bare, and aching, and alone, he walked back to the cottage. It was getting dark.

*

Rey found that she preferred driving by moonlight to navigating the brightly lit, busy streets of the Republic’s capital, Hosnian Prime. There, as she’d driven places, running errands for the Resistance while the trial had been dragging, she had constantly been blinded by the headlights of other cars.

The capital was blinding in many different ways, but once her eyes had adjusted, Rey had been able to see the glaring disbalance of it all, the rift between those _having_ _it all_ — and getting nothing after giving everything up to win the city’s favor. Even if the Republic’s government hadn’t horrified her by its Unkar Plutt-like cruelty, Rey would’ve still found Hosnian Prime repulsive. Gods and spirits, but she had wanted to go home. Wherever _home_ was.

On Ahch-To, alone on the mountain road, she was… in her element, sort of. Rey was driving as slowly as the truck’s engine would go without grinding to a halt, and the road was just curvy enough to keep Rey’s mind away from the knots in her stomach.

What in the world was she going to say?  _ I regretted ratting you out the moment they dragged you out of that bed and started beating you? I discovered I can’t stand the Republic and would rather go into exile as well? Once, I became so desperate I sneaked a pregnancy test from a Resistance medic; I knew I wasn’t pregnant, but still bawled my eyes out after it had shown the “negative” icon because I was so afraid they’d execute you and I’d have nothing— _

Then the headlights brought the wild stone wall of Luke’s cottage out of the darkness, and Ben was there as if— as if he hadn’t… moved since they — she — left him that morning. But no, no, of course he had. There was light in the house’s small windows, and he was dressed differently, in a soft gray shirt and similar pants that his mother had packed for him. He must’ve heard the car approaching and—  _ Oh. _ He looked pissed.

Before Rey lost her nerve, she threw the door open and jumped out of the running truck.

“You…?” Ben started, now seeming utterly lost, but Rey spoke too, interrupting him. Neither of them had anticipated the words that actually emerged from the jumble of Rey’s thoughts.

“Not telling me about stopping the bombing was dumb!” Gods and spirits. Did she  _ have _ to yell?

Ben blinked. Then, “Oh, yeah?! And if I did tell you, would you have paused long enough to hear the entire story?!” His hands had relaxed when he realized it was Rey in the car but balled into white-knuckled fists again as he yelled at her in turn.

“What choice did I have?! I was stranded with you under a fucking mountain!”

“I was scared of losing you and then it was too late!” The last word rang between the dark hills, Ahch-To eerily quiet around the two of them. Ben’s chest was heaving. “Rey, what are you doing here?” Suddenly, he sounded so tired. Ben rubbed his eyes, staring it his boots. “Is there a delay, the ship is leaky or something? You  _ know _ I’ve got nothing to do with—”

_ “The Marauder _ already left,” Rey said, voice barely above a whisper.

Ben looked up sharply. His cheeks were wet; the beaming headlights exposed it mercilessly. But his eyes — they became almost comically round.

“B-but,” he stuttered, “you’re here. How are you here…?”

Rey made a tentative step forward. She wanted to say so much, yet couldn’t force a single syllable out, a mouthful of regrets like salt water behind her thinly pressed lips. So Rey lay waste her walls, baring the devastation that her mistake from months ago had caused — and more.

_ Without you I’m all alone no matter how many people are around. I’m here because I love you. _

Ben approached her in three wide strides, taking her off-guard. She’d expected to find him wary and hurt, not… open. Yet he did open himself up, and in that moment Rey finally and wholeheartedly believed what she’d known since the emerald cave but had been afraid to acknowledge — that he loved her, too.

*

On board the  _ Sea Marauder _ , Luke Skywalker leaned on the railing of the ship’s stern, a steaming mug of sweet black tea fixed in his prosthesis. It was peaceful out, the waters pliant and the smell of Ahch-To honey rising from his mug. But as he was about to slide into his evening meditation, being in the right state of mind for the first time in days, tripping steps banged up the stairs from the cargo hold. Luke sighed. A moment later, Finn appeared at the stern, wild-eyed.

“Rey’s not in her cabin and I can’t find her anywhere! Luke, Luke, I think she stayed behind! On the island!”

“Of course she did.” Luke sipped his tea.

“Of—” Finn sputtered. “We gotta turn the ship! He’ll kill her if he realizes she’s th—  _ Why _ are you smiling?!”

“Oh, Leia kept telling me that’s the case but I wouldn’t believe her, old fool, and kept assuming the worst. It’s good to be wrong.” Luke shook his gray head, feeling more at peace than he had ever since starting all this mess by assuming the worst about Ben and acting on it. Since Han.

“Luke.” Ah, someone was losing patience. “What the hell are you talking about? We  _ need _ to turn the ship.”

“You’ve got a thing with Poe Dameron going on, haven’t you?” Finn looked like the abrupt change of topic knocked his wits overboard, which amused Luke to no end. “Well,” he continued as if speaking to a child, “the very same thing’s happening back there, so, no, we don’t need to turn. Ben won’t hurt Rey. But us, should we interrupt them? He very well might.”

And, oh, Finn’s horrified expression was even better than the confused one. Taking pity on him, Luke patted his shoulder.

“Comm Dameron, kid, and have some tea. Everything’s how it’s meant to be.”

At last.

*

Rey’s palms met his chest when Ben was only half a step away. She locked her elbows,  _ keeping _ him half a step away. His heart stuttered under her touch.

“Why aren’t you angry?!” she demanded, the shakiness of her voice poorly masked by the firm tone. Her hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt but Ben wasn’t sure she noticed it. “I betrayed you. It’s worse than leaving you for dead was! You should hate me by now.”

“Should I?”

_ “Yes.” _

“Why did you come, then? You’re willingly placing your head between a lion’s jaws — why?”

Rey scoffed. “You’re not a _ lion. _ And I’ve just shown you. I couldn’t— I  _ can’t _ simply  _ move on. _ I needed to let you know that I’m... sorry.”

“You could’ve done it back on the ship.” Ben shook his head slowly. “Now you’re stuck here. And I thought  _ I _ was bad at planning.”

“It was more of a hope than a plan,” she mumbled, making a move to release his shirt. Ben caught her hands in his, pressing them over his heart again. “I tried  _ not  _ to hope but….”

“What were you hoping for?” he asked, searching her face, and finally, finally Rey met his eyes.

“That I’d be stuck here long enough for you to forgive me.”

“Then I’ll save us some time.”  

Between the two of them, they had enough mind to kill the engine before Ben carried Rey inside, her legs around his waist, her lips on his vulnerable throat. She twined her arms around his frame like she wanted to protect him — or did he read the determination to do so in her heart? Either way, Ben tightened his hold on her in answer.

The desire her nearness lit up in him was teetering on the edge of physically painful. As Rey grinded against him, Ben’s knees all but gave out, blood rushing south, sending both of them tumbling down onto a mattress by the blazing hearth. Rey landed on her back with an  _ oof! _ and Ben plopped his palms on the mattress on either side of her head at the last second. Springs creaked suggestively.

“That’s… conveniently placed,” Rey breathed out, patting his makeshift bed.

It took him quite a while to stop kissing her collarbones through her shirt, and as Ben lifted his head he immediately lost his train of thought. Why did he ever stop?

_ Oh. Right. _

_ The mattress. _

“The whole house is damp after the winter,” he rasped, hovering above her on his elbows, “and I’m done with sleeping where it’s cold and damp, so…. Didn’t think I’d need more than one room, anyway,” Ben added quieter, fighting the urge to screw his eyes shut and open them again to see if any of it was real.

Maybe he stepped off that cliff and was seeing this paradise as the final nips of electricity ran through his shutting down brain. Maybe he still was in his box of a cell, dying on his back, drowning in his own puke.

_ How is she here? _

Rey cupped his cheeks and brought him down for a chaste kiss. Then she touched her forehead to his.

“While I was staying with your mother’s people, I was given a warm and dry bunk,” she said, her warm breath fanning over Ben’s lips. “I was so sick of sleeping there in the end, I’d pump myself on acorn coffee and stay awake for as long as my feet would hold me.”

“Acorn coffee is disgusting. Why would you do it to yourself?”

“I kept dreaming… of your body beside mine.” She pecked at his chin. “Of this furnace you call a chest pressed to my back.” A kiss to the tip of his nose. “Of your snores tickling my neck.” At this, laughter bubbled in Ben’s throat, but Rey kissed him on the lips again, deeper, and it turned into a muffled groan.

_ I’m done sleeping without you. _

He didn’t mean to actually fall asleep, considering how awake certain parts of his body were.

Yet he did, the immense relief of having Rey in his arms again knocking him out the second his forehead touched the pillow beside Rey’s head.

*

Thick tendrils of fog were clinging to the windows when Rey unstuck her face from the pillow. She’d been drooling but couldn’t bring herself to be embarrassed about it: lying by her side, Ben wasn’t looking much more dignified, his overlong hair reminiscent of a bird nest, features lax.

White fog, white pillowcase, black hair.

Rey had seen it all before.

_ No water in the med kit. No water in their bags. She had another hallucination as she half slapped, half caressed his cheeks —  Rey saw Ren’s face, still, but instead of the cave floor there was a pillow under his head, the light pillowcase in stark contrast with his longer hair. _

Looking at Ben now, she knew she’d made the right choice.

Tiptoeing around the antique cottage with its woods, and gray stone, and brass pipes, she found coffee. The real thing, not the acorn one — Leia had pulled some strings and sneaked a crate full of small vacuum bags into Ben’s supplies. Rey’d watched Leia make coffee a few times, and copied the elderly General as best as she could, hurrying back to the mattress with two mugs in hand and a handful of sugar cubes in her pocket. She didn’t know how Ben liked his coffee and the prospect of learning it excited her.

Ben’s eyes glinted in the slits between his sleep-heavy lids, tracking Rey’s movements.

“If you’re awake, take your mug from me. My fingers are burning,” Rey said sheepishly, a pang of guilt over the last time she had stood over him like that causing her breath to catch.

He obeyed, sitting up as she kneeled on the mattress. The simple ceramic mug seemed almost elegant when Ben was holding it.

“No more running off?” he asked his coffee, half question, half statement.

Emphatically, Rey shook her head “no.” “Ben, I— I had started to regret it back in that motel, long before your mother shared the info about you sabotaging the bombing with me. Hell, I  _ went _ to your mother because of the… cutting wrongness of what I did.” The swirling depths of black coffee were a welcome distraction from the prickling in the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know if I’d be here if you hadn’t tried to stop the Order but—” Her throat closing up, Rey had to take a calming breath. “You never answered me. Why aren’t you angry?”

“I don’t know,” he answered after a prolonged silence. “I was after we’d spoken on the ship. Even though I’d been telling myself that I had made peace with things inevitably going to shit, waking up to you outside of my  _ cell _ was…. But then the night ended, and all I could feel was loss. Maybe I would’ve grown to hate you with time, but you came back.” Ben had put his mug on the floor and was turning Rey’s face to him, thumbs tracing wet lines on her cheeks. “Rey. You came back — it means more than you leaving. And you  _ did _ save me, too, by alerting my mother to my capture.”

A steadying inhale; that funny lip movement of his. Rey could sense him carefully thinking over what he was about to say next.

“I’m not an innocent man. I deserve worse than exile. But I want to give you a home — a real one rather than a life on the run — because I believe… that you’re my destiny. Will you accept me as yours?”

“Yes,” Rey whispered against Ben’s lips, surging forward like a wave, happiness high in her throat.  _ Yes, yes. _

She straddled him, their mugs forgotten in the dusty floorboards.

_ Yes. _ They shed their rumpled clothes, bare before each other in the pale morning light. She pressed his fingertips to the knob under the skin just above her elbow — a contraceptive implant. Ben sucked a hickey onto it. He stretched her with his fingers, and teased her with his tongue —  _ let me do this right _ — and kissed her through her orgasm, his leaking cock heavy on Rey’s thigh.

_ “Yes,” _ Ben grunted as he pushed inside, and Rey echoed him, split in two and whole, their minds locked together.

Afterwards, as she was counting love bites dotting his sweaty chest and he was humming off-tune against her hairline, Rey cast a glance around the room. Sun rays were dripping from the windowsills. There was… dancing dust, and mold in one corner, and hella lot of work.

Didn’t Luke say something about the pump malfunctioning?

Rey stretched, wincing a little at the soreness between her legs.

“You know,” she mused, noticing something, “if we’re going to continue with the… mind fucking… we need to make a fire screen.”

“Huh?” Ben turned, following her gaze. Now-cold embers from the hearth were strewn across the floor, their coffee covered in gray specs. “Oh. I think I saw a metal sheet somewhere around the house. But, since nothing is burning, I suggest we continue now and look for it later.”

“Sounds good,” Rey returned his grin before kissing him soundly.

The house was quiet around them save for the sounds of their lovemaking, slow, and thorough, and fearless. The island was green, and the ocean gray, and the wind was filled with bird cries and the approaching summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is it. The end. :3  
> Thank you for reading! Please, let me know what you think, I value every comment!  
> I've no plans for future long fics at the moment, but I take prompts for ficlets - send them my way if you're interested.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think in the comments! :D  
> Also, come say hi to me on Dreamwidth, I'm there under the same name.


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